Grappling with the ramifications of Artificial Intelligence is one of the first things science fiction ever did as a genre. Yet most sci-fi books, movies, and games explore those ideas from the perspective of a person, whether we're taking down SHODAN in System Shock or chatting with Cortana in Halo. That's something the developers of Per Aspera, Tlön Industries, wanted to change. From their offices in Buenos Aires the team of about 12 people have spent the last few years trying to figure out what it would be like to inhabit the mind of a newly awakened—a newborn—Artificial Consciousness.The result is Per Aspera, a strategic city-builder that has players working to terraform Mars as the artificial consciousness AMI. You're a genderless superintelligence capable of incredible things, but you're also effectively a child with no conception of society or social interaction.

Today's self-driving car isn't exactly autonomous – the driver has to be able to take over in a pinch, and therein lies the roadblock researchers are trying to overcome. Automated cars are hurtling towards us at breakneck speed, with all-electric Teslas already running limited autopilot systems on roads worldwide and Google trialling its own autonomous pod cars. However, before we can reply to emails while being driven to work, we have to have a foolproof way to determine when drivers can safely take control and when it should be left to the car. 'Even in a limited number of tests, we have found that humans are not always performing as required,' explained Dr Riender Happee, from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, who is coordinating the EU-funded HFAuto project to examine the problem and potential solutions. 'We are close to concluding that the technology always has to be ready to resolve the situation if the driver doesn't take back control.'