Computers have guided us to the moon and back but can't help us with us with the biggest decisions we face today. Should Donald Trump be impeached? Should Britain leave the EU? Should Australia stop exporting fossil fuels? Questions like these do not have yes or no answers, however tempting it is to think otherwise.

The version of Project Debater used in the live debates included the seeds of the latest system, such as the capability to search hundreds of millions of new articles. But in the months since, the team has extensively tweaked the neural networks it uses, improving the quality of the evidence the system can unearth. One important addition is BERT, a neural network Google built for natural-language processing, which can answer queries. The work will be presented at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference in New York next month.

Artificial Intelligence is a term the public is increasingly familiar with. After all, in 2003, a computer programme was causing mass mayhem. It was rapidly and successfully overwriting core programmes within a global network and almost achieved complete control – well, in the film The Matrix Reloaded at least! Far-fetched and futuristic as that film seemed all those years ago, and whilst we are not yet seeing'Agent Smith' levels of Artificial Intelligence or a post-apocalyptic future where machines rule humans, robots taking over networks are not a figment of imagination anymore. Last December, 'BlackEnergy' malware targeted power companies in western Ukraine with great speed and precision, causing a blackout that affected more than 225,000 civilians . Before that, 'BlackEnergy' had overwritten file extensions within Ukrainian media companies, rendering their operating systems unbootable.