Are machines about to become smarter than humans? If you take the leaders of artificial intelligence companies at their word, their products mean that the coming decade will be quite unlike any in human history: a golden era of "radical abundance", where high-energy physics is "solved" and we see the beginning of space colonisation. But researchers working with today's most powerful AI systems are finding a different reality, in which even the best models are failing to solve basic puzzles that most humans find trivial, while the promise of AI that can "reason" seems to be overblown. So, whom should you believe? Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis, the CEOs of OpenAI and Google DeepMind, respectively, have both made recent claims that powerful, world-altering AI systems are just around the corner.

"Chemists like me have been working on trying to turn molecules into machines for about 25 years now," says Leigh, an organic chemist from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. You're building on all those that went before you." In 1936, English mathematician Alan Turing imagined an autonomous machine capable of carrying out any precisely coded algorithm. The hypothetical machine would read a strip of tape dotted with symbols that, when interpreted sequentially, would instruct the machine to act. It might transcribe, translate, or compute--turning code into a message, or a math problem into an answer.

The environment was something of a shift for Drake, who had spent the previous seven years as the medical response director of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Though it was the longtime leader in cryonics, Alcor was still a small nonprofit. It had been freezing the bodies and brains of its members, with the idea of one day bringing them back to life, since 1976. The foundation, and cryonics in general, had long survived outside of mainstream acceptance. Typically shunned by the scientific community, cryonics is best known for its appearance in sci-fi films like 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Artificial intelligence – AI – was a mere computational theory back in the 1950s when Alan Turing designed the first Turing Test to measure a machine's intelligence. Today, AI inhabits consumer electronics in the form of Siri, Cortana, Alexa and Google Assistant – it lives behind our internet browsers, within the relative confines of wireless networks and circuit boards. We interact with AI all the time – Google's auto-suggest function, customer service bots and YouTube's search algorithm are all examples of AI. In just half a century, AI's role in society has become firmly established. Developments in software programming and IT have facilitated important innovations in AI.

Here are the slides I gave recently as member of panel Sci-Fi Dreams: How visions of the future are shaping the development of intelligent technology, at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence 2017 conference. I presented three short stories about robot stories. The FP7 TRUCE Project invited a number of scientists – mostly within the field of Artificial Life – to suggest ideas for short stories. Those stories were then sent to a panel of writers, who chose one of the stories. I submitted an idea called The feeling of what it is like to be a robot and was delighted when Lucy Caldwell contacted me.

The Internet of Things is here, they cried. Great, but do I really have to pull out my smartphone to do everything? Pushing a button was so much easier. Can't I just talk to my house now? Can I scream "red alert" and have my lights flash red? For decades we've been shown that voice is the future.

The Internet of Things is here, they cried. Great, but do I really have to pull out my smartphone to do everything? Pushing a button was so much easier. Can't I just talk to my house now? Can I scream "red alert" and have my lights flash red? For decades we've been shown that voice is the future.