Just what is artificial intelligence, anyway? In its ultimate form, will it model, augment or replace human thought? But we can get closer to settling the big AI debate by asking another question first. "We need to step back and ask why we're trying to replicate human intelligence when we've already got 8 billion people to solve a problem," says Peter J. Scott, founder of the Next Wave Institute, an organization that provides training on how to survive technology disruption, especially that caused by the coming of AI. "We have to be more careful about how we frame this," says Scott, author of Artificial Intelligence and You: Survive and Thrive Through AI's Impact on Your Life, Your Work, and Your World. "We want [AI] to be able to do some of the things humans can do. But what we're aiming for is not another human intelligence wrought in silicon, but a hybrid of human and computer. So maybe we're not rushing toward futurist Ray Kurzweil's singularity: the moment he envisions when ...

Dr Bayju Thakar is a former NHS doctor and founder of the digital health company Doctor Care Anywhere, who writes about the role of AI in digital health. Whether wide-eyed forecasts that it'll replace human clinicians in the foreseeable future, or alarm bells suggesting it's a danger to public health, AI's barely out of the news. I'm certainly reluctant to see chatbots as a viable alternative to clinician care – on which more below – but I'd rather we didn't make a bogeyman from these technologies either. I think a dose of patience is needed here – we mustn't rush into adoption of such revolutionary tech, but equally let's not scare ourselves witless over what it can do. I see AI as rather like a child prodigy.