The history of artificial intelligence is a history of boring conferences. The term itself was first coined at a boring conference, one that took place in the summer of 1965 at Dartmouth College. One could chart a number of pre-histories when it comes to anxieties around smart, responsive machines and their effects on our world, but the real hype has always been underlaid by the bureaucratic haze of lanyards, plenaries, and good timekeeping. The hype waned during the 1970s, a time sometimes known as the'AI Winter', before being inflated again with the injection of private capital by those interested in the labour-saving potentials of the technology. The ever-looming'Jobpocolypse' brought about by AI quickly became a pressing concern for AI ethicists and policy wonks of all stripes.

What if the next life were no better than this one? Not a heaven or a hell, or even a purgatorial waiting room, but a world that operates according to the same rules as the one that came before it, only tweaked enough that we don't just accept them as the way things have to be. In the near future of Upload, whose first season begins streaming on Amazon Prime on Friday, death is not the end, at least for those with the resources to survive it. But the hereafter in Greg Daniels' series isn't spiritual, it's digital, and everything, including entry and your continued existence, comes at a cost. It's less like heaven than a cruise ship on an infinite voyage, one where everything is marked up because the dead aren't in much of a position to comparison-shop. Nathan Brown (Robbie Amell) finds his way to Lakeview, as his particularly plush digital forever is called, after his self-driving car rear-ends a garbage truck.