"Hum," Helen Phillips's third novel, begins with a needle being drawn, steadily and irreversibly, across a woman named May's face. She is participating in a paid experiment in "adversarial tech," undergoing a procedure that will ever so slightly alter her features, making her harder for surveillance cameras to identify. As the book opens, May is mid-op, the needle advancing its "slender and relentless line of penetration" across her temple, toward the skin of her eyelid. What lies on the other side of the surgery? "Some sort of transformation, undeniable but undetectable," Phillips writes.

Artificial intelligence is already having an impact on almost every industry and human being. Today, AI has transformed our lives, from voice recognition devices to intelligent chatbots. This amazing technology has brought many good and bad things into our lives, and it will have an even greater impact in the coming decades. However, every good thing has a drawback, and AI is no exception. Some of the most respected leaders of science, most notably the late Stephen Hawking, have expressed concern that super-intelligent machines could pose a long-term threat to humanity.

These are the dystopian worlds where technology breaks free from their human creators and takes over the world, expressing our fears about the prevailing technology of the time and its potential to destroy our environment. At Innovate UK there are many illustrations of this convergence of technologies of AI impacting areas as diverse as health, environment and energy, agriculture, security, education, creative industries, entertainment and public services. Their funding is focused on developing a Green AI Auditor (GAIA) to enable sustainable and resource-efficient AI uptake for the financial services market. So while I am not a robot some of my friends are, helping to address issues of egalitarian access to technologies, developing digital skills and creating skilled occupations and seizing opportunities for new social bonding and community building through technology. And in the Sustainable Innovation Fund we are equipping people to use technologies to enhance human wellbeing and benefit our lives in the present and future.

Singapore has trialled patrol robots that blast warnings at people engaging in "undesirable social behaviour", adding to an arsenal of surveillance technology in the tightly controlled city-state that is fuelling privacy concerns. From vast numbers of CCTV cameras to trials of lampposts kitted out with facial recognition tech, Singapore is seeing an explosion of tools to track its inhabitants. That includes a three-week trial in September, in which two robots were deployed to patrol a housing estate and a shopping centre. Officials have long pushed a vision of a hyper-efficient, tech-driven "smart nation", but activists say privacy is being sacrificed and people have little control over what happens to their data. Singapore is frequently criticised for curbing civil liberties and people are accustomed to tight controls, but there is still growing unease at intrusive tech.

"Slaughterbots" directed by Stewart Sugg In a dystopian world a new form of A.I. weaponry has been created. All these drone bots need is a profile: age, sex, fitness, uniform, and ethnicity. Take out your entire enemy virtually risk free. Just characterize him, release the swarm, and rest easy. The 7 minute film opens with a Silicon Valley CEO-type delivering a product presentation to a live audience a la Steve Jobs.