Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens became an international bestseller by presenting a view of history driven by the fictions created by mankind. His later work Homo Deus then depicted the a future for mankind brought about by the emergence of superintelligence. His latest book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI, is a warning against the unparalleled threat of AI. A rising trend of techno-fascism driven by populism and artificial intelligence has been visible since the US presidential election in November. Nexus, which was published just a few months earlier, is a timely explainer of the potential consequences of AI on democracy and totalitarianism.

If you're subscribed to Amazon Prime Video, it's likely you've seen'Space Cadet' promoted at the top of your feed this week. The movie has raced to the top of the charts and sees Emma Roberts star as a trainee astronaut at NASA. In the film, Roberts' character, Rex, manages to make it on to NASA's training programme by faking her CV. However, in reality, it's much trickier to be selected, with just 360 lucky candidates making the cut at the US space agency since the 1960s. So, do you have what it takes to become an astonaut?

In a year since its release, ChatGPT has already been used to draft essays, create beer, write best man speeches and even prescribe antibiotics. Now, a kiltmaker has used the artificial intelligence (AI) tool to design a new tartan – and it's already been accepted onto the official Scottish Register. Steven Sim, 52, a former graphic designer based in Arbroath, said he was simply'blown away' by the chatbot's intelligence. The creation features prominent red, to represent the'passion that drives AI development, and gold for'the brilliance and illumination AI brings to the world'. Also included in the swish design are several hidden references to AI and science fiction, including'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'.

It's been a while since we had a truly great movie about devious, dystopian AIs priming themselves to take over the world, in which the key choices made by mere humans will decide whether we end up as just an organic footnote in histories written by our machine conquerors. Alex Garland's Ex-Machina (2014) springs to mind, while 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron was a fun comic book romp, if lacking the spiky gravitas and sly intellectual thrust of Garland's debut. Now there's Gareth Edwards' The Creator, the first trailer for which debuted this week, arriving just as very real concerns about the ability of artificial intelligence to really muck things up for us humans are rearing their terrifying digital heads. At first glance, it looks as if Edwards has thrown in all our favourite sci-fi tropes. The basic scenario – tooled up military man fails in mission to wipe out robot child because she is just too cute – reminds us of kind-hearted Din Djarin's inability to bounty hunt Grogu in early episodes of The Mandalorian.

Today's date is April 13th, 2023. Since the public unveiling of ChatGPT couple of months ago, a large language model developed by OpenAI, we have been experiencing a continuous, probably exponential, advancement in AI which could cause the world, as we know it today, to be completely different in just a couple of years. One of the latest ground breaking experiments involved enabling GPT Agents to speak with each other, with a human merely specifying the context of the conversation before hand, e.g. "find a potential cure for cancer" and the two agents would start researching and dig deeper and browse the internet, perform researches, run simulations and do calculations that would be unfeasible for most researchers to do. If we'd compare AI to a human, then it would be only a couple of weeks old.

The first Artificial Intelligence ever created was Pandora, a creation of the Greek gods Hephaestus and Athena. Pandora means both "all-gifted" and "all-giving" and was constructed with attributes from every other Olympian god. Pandora was created at the request of Zeus, the king of the gods, as a punishment for Prometheus stealing fire, the first disruptive technology, and handing it over to mankind. Zeus punishes Prometheus, the proto-god of technology and intelligence, for giving fire to mankind by chaining him to a rock, and he punishes mankind by giving them Pandora, the first A.I., who has been endowed with attributes from all of the gods. But how is this gift a punishment?

By Latha Srinivasan: There are many lessons to be learnt from the ideology of our Sanskrit epics, say scholars. The contribution of the Bhagavad Gita to management principles is well-documented today. Now, there is a train of thought that believes the Mahabharata can teach us how to manage machine autonomy and Artificial Intelligence (AI). While experts believe that AI will improve human effectiveness, capacities, and open a world of vast opportunities, it also presents us with unprecedented threats. So how does the Mahabharata help us in this context?

Have you ever seen the movie The Terminator? If you have, then you'll get where I'm going with this. If you haven't, then I've aged myself big time, and here's a quick summary: The Terminator is based on a cyborg assassin (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) who is sent back in time from 2029 to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, whose unborn son is destined to save mankind from extinction by a company called Skynet. Skynet is an Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) industry responsible for a post-apocalyptic future where robots take over the world. While this movie (and its many sequels) became a big hit all over the world, it's also one of the movies that have inspired the general public to not trust A.I. I can't tell you how many times a new piece of technology is created without hearing some form of warning or fear: "Watch out for the robots will come and take over the world!"

Advanced artificial intelligence could one day'kill everyone' – and there would be nothing we could do to stop it, MPs have been warned. Experts from Oxford University said when AI eventually becomes more intelligent than us it is likely to pose as great a threat as mankind did to the dodo. Reaching this stage – known as superhuman AI – could be achieved by the end of the century, they told the Science and Technology Select Committee. Warning of a'literal arms race' among nation states and tech firms, Michael Osborne, professor of machine learning, called for global regulation to stop tech firms creating out-of-control systems that could end up'eliminating the whole human race'. The evidence was heard as part of a Government inquiry into the risks posed by AI and how it can be used in an ethical and responsible way.

I write this in response to a post by Deepak Malhotra. I decided to post it as a separate piece as I believe we have just turned another corner in the technology revolution. In my mind it's a bit like the introduction of say the commodoore 64 computer in the early 80's. Looking back over those 40 years, we can see just how infantile that technology was at the time. Nevertheless, these machines, combined with the basic programming code revolutionised the way we played and worked in both our homes and our businesses. I think ChatGPT will be seen as the first, next step, in the rise of the machines.