We must think now about the consequences that AI will have very shortly in our lives – changing work, society, economics and more. There's some encouragement that at last governments around the world are waking up to the size of some of the societal questions that AI innovation will ask of us. There is nothing to say that our economic system requires a constant amount of human labour; we should treat the reduction in need for labour as a huge positive, rather than seeking to generate jobs simply to keep people occupied. Shorter working weeks would give more people a stake in employment, and also give them more time to do other things with their lives.

Discussions around artificial intelligence (AI) provoke both excitement and fear in strong measure. Just last week, Elon Musk predicted that AI will be the most likely cause of World War III (although perhaps he just wasn't following President Donald Trump closely enough). As happens so often with new advances, policymaking lags significantly behind. We must think now about the consequences that AI will have very shortly in our lives – changing work, society, economics and more. There's some encouragement that at last governments around the world are waking up to the size of some of the societal questions that AI innovation will ask of us.