AI systems can be found in the smartphone in your pocket and are becoming increasingly important – and ever more powerful – in our day-to-day lives. It's a theme we have previously explored in the article AI Is All Around Us. And in the article AI – Two Letters, Many Meanings, we clarified that these kinds of systems are also referred to as narrow AI. Narrow AI systems are very specialized – hence they are very efficient in performing the tasks for which they are designed, easily outperforming humans in doing so. However, these systems fail to solve problems outside of their assigned functionality, and struggle to transfer knowledge from one field to another.

AI means a lot of things to a lot of people. Usually what it means is not very well thought out. It is felt, it is intuited. It is either adored, worshipped or deemed blasphemous, profane, to be feared. In this article, I explore what society at large really means by artificial intelligence as opposed to what researchers or computer scientists mean. I want to clarify for the non-technical audience what can realistically be expected from AI, and more importantly, what is just unrealistic pie-in-the-sky speculation.

If you leave your iPad untouched for a few days, you probably do not need to worry about much more than a flat battery and a backlog of emails. But with artificial intelligence, computers could soon have their own set of'rights' that could let them sue you for neglect, according to a leading scientist. Professor Marcus du Sautoy, a mathematician at Oxford University, has suggested that as AI leads to our devices developing their own consciousness, they may need their own laws to protect them. Advances in artificial intelligence could lead to computers and smartphones developing consciousness and they may need to be given'human' rights. He claims that if technology is conscious, it could also then be deemed as being alive, and so could win the right to be governed by laws on human rights.

Prof du Sautoy added: "In babies there is something called the mirror self-recognition test, a moment where a child recognises the image in the mirror is themselves and has a sense of self. "I think there is something in the brain development which might be like a boiling point. It may be a threshold moment. "Philosophers will say that doesn't guarantee that that thing is really feeling anything and really has a sense of self. It might be just saying all the things that make us think it's alive. But then even in humans we can't know that what a person is saying is real. "Consciousness is like a box that we all have and inside this box we all have something called a beetle.