Mustafa sits motionless behind the wheel, upturned hands in his lap, as his taxi drives itself, bringing the United Arab Emirates closer to an autonomous future. The "safety officer" is part of a trial for driverless cabs in the capital Abu Dhabi, where customers can be picked up and dropped off at nine pre-determined spots on Yas Island. It's been a "smooth ride" so far, said Mustafa, with no incidents that required any major intervention. Passengers' view of monitor showing road navigation, from the interior of a self-driving taxi being used in a tech demonstration in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi Photo: AFP / Giuseppe CACACE "In the past few days, we've had most customers order taxis from the mall or hotel," he told AFP. Bayanat, a branch of the Abu Dhabi-based Group 42 tech company, last month launched the trial of four driverless vehicles, two electric and two hybrid, under the name TXAI.

Just over two years ago, Microsoft released a chatbot on Twitter named Tay. Created to mimic the speech and spelling of a 19-year-old American girl, the program was designed to interact with other Twitter users and get smarter as it discovered more about the world through their posts--a process called machine learning. Rather than becoming an after-school chum for bored teens, though, Tay was soon tweeting everything from "I'm smoking kush in front of the police" to "I fucking hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell." She was shut down 16 hours after her launch. Tay's rants--which featured racist slurs and Holocaust denials--tapped into people's biggest anxieties about the future of artificial intelligence (AI). With no moral compass to guide them, the fear goes, machines will be unable to follow the same social rules as humans.