Artificial intelligence – defining it is like trying to lift water with your hands. In part maybe because it has such mythical proportion (Can it "wake up"? Might it wipe out the human race? Can it fix global warming?). In part maybe because it is the domain of especially smart experts. Or maybe for other reasons, in any case the concept of AI is both real business and a canvas onto which we project our fears and dreams.

The "Luddite fallacy" is the idea that increasing productivity leads to long-term job loss. The original Luddites (named after Ned Ludd who allegedly smashed two stocking frames in 1779) rebelled against the mechanisation of production in the early days of the Industrial revolution, destroying spinning frames and other new machines that threatened their employment. Since new and better jobs came after, the fallacy is that jobs are permanently lost rather than replaced. This was always the case, the hunters and gatherers lost their outcome to farmers at the dawn of agriculture. More recently, qualified industrial jobs have been replaced by robots, low-qualified white-collar jobs (secretaries, ticket clerks, switch-board operators) by computers.

The Bank of England's warning that the pace of artificial intelligence development now threatens 15m UK jobs has prompted calls for political intervention. According to scientists and legal experts, responding to the bank's warning this November, there is now an urgent need for the development of intelligent algorithms to be put on the political agenda. This is happening now and across the board and that's the difference. That's why a lot of us need to start talking about this now. The Government needs to pick up on this and put it on the political agenda and look at regulatory issues, said Chrissie Lightfoot, a patent lawyer and author, who debated fears over unemployment caused by AI at London's Science Museum last October.

We have seen how the internet of things and the growing phenomenon of'big data' will throw up major problems for consumers and citizens, problems that have as yet barely been grasped by most policy-makers. In this world of growing complexity, the potential for an unintended consequence becomes greater and greater from machines performing an action that was not anticipated. There are key issues, too, about our reliance on data at a time of massive data generation, data storing and data preservation which have the potential to both obscure results and generate injustices. Perhaps the greatest issue that we now face is caused by our blind faith in machines. We have invested them with certainty and – as we have pointed out – we trust them. Part of the reason for this is an odd confusion that has conflated the machines of the industrial age with the machines of the information age.

"The truck regarded them calmly, its receptors blank and impassive. It was doing its job. The planet-wide network of automatic factories was smoothly performing the task imposed on it five years before, in the early days of the Total Global Conflict." Written by famous and farsighted Phillip K. Dick in 1955, his central characters, three human survivors of the War, fight these factories and finally succeed in regaining control by eventually turning them against each other and thus making them destroying themselves. Above scenario describes a world in which humans constantly struggle to outsmart machines that are as smart as mice.

"From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's Monster to the classical myth of Pygmalion, through the story of Prague's Golem to the robot of Karel Čapek, who coined the word, people have fantasised about the possibility of building intelligent machines, more often than not androids with human features". This is not an excerpt from a book on the history of robots in literature, but the opening sentence of the brand new European Parliament report on Robotics. Beyond this anecdotal reference, this draft report attempts to answer a question: as the presence of robots in our societies is no longer a science-fiction fantasy, and with people interacting more and more with intelligent machines in their day-to-day lives, is the future of humanity threatened? While the European Commission does currently fund robotics projects, the EU lacks a common regulatory framework in this field. Against this backdrop, the legal affairs committee of the European Parliament, has been entrusted with the task of writing a report on the issue of robotics, and has elaborated policy recommendations for the European Commission.

MEPs have approved rules for keeping humans firmly in charge of Artificial Intelligence (AI). They include ways to establish liability in law, for example where driverless cars cause accidents. They have also called for ethical standards to be built in to AI algorithms and robots that work for humans, and standardisation across Member States to ensure a level playing field for technology companies. After a heated debate, the vote was passed on Thursday by a large majority, 369 to 123 with 85 abstentions. But clauses that would introduce a basic state allowance for people who lose their jobs to robotisation were defeated. A coalition of right-wing parties voted them out.

In the third decade of the commercial internet, concentration of power and money is greater than ever. Will this process stop or reverse? Or are we heading for a future of even stronger corporate dominance? Netopia talked to Jonathan Taplin, author of Move Fast and Break Things – a book which takes a closer look at the ideology and business of Silicon Valley's internet skyscrapers. Per Strömbäck: Is the "do first, ask later"-ideology the key to Silicon Valley's success?

Choosing „The Inevitable" as a title for one's book makes a clear statement: I am in a position to declare the future. I don't bother if I am right or wrong. Kevin Kelly has done it before: "Author of What Technology Wants" is displayed proudly on the book's cover. Kelly has a known track record as a technology evangelist. He has been editor famous of the Californian counterculture's catalogue Whole Earth Review, co-sponsor of the first Hackers Conference and executive editor at Wired Magazine. The Inevitable makes a big promise: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Shape Our Future. Cool trick: Every review of the book will surely spend the maximum allowed number of characters just to sum up these twelve forces! As a matter fact, the book has received much attention, but hardly any criticism. Although the book is listed as a "New York Times Bestseller" and is among the Top Ten in Amazon's Business Processes and Infrastructure-section, no solid review is to be found via Google – only interviews with the author, which basically function like advertisement. The impression of a Silicon Valley conspiracy is hard to resist. To be fair: In the opening chapter, where Kelly sets the tone, everything is done to avoid the impression that The Inevitable will just present random guesses at the future. The basic concept is this: There are some technical developments which are inevitable. But within the areas defined by these cornerstones, many options are possible. That sooner or later someone just must have come up with the invention of the telephone is, according to Kelly, inevitable. The i-phone, on the other hand, is not inevitable. The car was inevitable – the SUV is not. One might argue about the specific examples. But that there are some inventions which, in the history of a civilization such as ours, are very likely to happen is per se an appealing thought. A second element of inevitability is process. Once installed, a process will run by itself. If successful, it will be replicated. Kelly's example for this is the scientific method. "This methodical process of constant change and improvement was a million times better than inventing any particular product, because the process generated a million new products over the centuries since we invented it." Again: One might argue if something like the scientific method exists and if it does exist, it will really breed products. But as a general approach, looking for processes in order to detect inevitabilities seems promising. Some parts of the book indeed follow this line. In these parts, Kelly shows us how to think about the future in an interesting and inspiring way – without making predictions. "You'll simply plug into the grid and get AI as if it was electricity.