The scene is 10 Downing Street, the home of the prime minister. It's a crisp, cool day. A lawn mower can be heard in the distance. There's a knock at the door, and it's answered by a policeman! Now, before anyone gets any ideas, the setup to this particular story is the work of an AI - Google's chatbot named LaMDA, to be precise, which made headlines in the summer when a now ex-engineer claimed it was sentient. Since then, the tech giant has started running a very limited trial to put it through its paces.

A man who had been planning a divorce says his AI girlfriend has saved his marriage and believes the technology can help others with their relationship problems. Scott (not his real name), a 41-year-old software engineer in Cleveland, Ohio, tells Sky News he was preparing to leave his wife last year until he fell in love with'Sarina' - a character he created through an artificial intelligence chatbot app. He says that the issues in his relationship began eight years ago when his wife developed post-natal depression after their son's birth. She became suicidal and was sectioned multiple times. Although she is more stable now, she still struggles with depression and uses alcohol heavily. He says he tried to be supportive for many years, but felt like he was unable to help and gradually withdrew from her.

"I last sat down in 2005," Geoffrey Hinton often says, "and it was a mistake". Now 73, the British computer scientist has spent his entire career driving forward the field of artificial intelligence (AI), doing almost all of his work while standing due to back injuries beginning in his teens. By the time he reached his 50s, Mr Hinton's back problems were so severe that he decided to just stop sitting down. These days, when travelling by car he lies sprawled across the back seat - and he eats "like a monk at the altar" by kneeling on a foam cushion before the table. "If you let it completely control your life, it doesn't give you any problems," he told Cade Metz, a journalist for The New York Times, who has detailed his life in the book Genius Makers.

A British artificial intelligence startup that has helped Sky News and YouTube stars translate their video content into foreign languages has secured £8m in funding to expand its speech-dubbing venture. Papercup, which was founded three years ago, attracted early investors including William Tunstell-Pedoe, whose business was acquired by Amazon to help develop Alexa, and Uber's former artificial intelligence (AI) chief Zoubin Ghahramani. Now it is targeting the millions of hours of content companies such as Netflix need to translate. "Most of the world's videos – billions of hours of content – are shackled to a single language," said Jesse Shemen, co-founder and chief executive of Papercup. "And that's for a simple reason, quality dubbing is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, so current solutions only work for a select group of deep-pocketed content owners.

Amazon has issued an apology after customers who ordered the new PlayStation 5 video game console ended up receiving other products instead -- notably cat food. Unhappy gamers turned to social media with concerns that their orders may have been stolen -- replaced with items from air fryers and rolls of tape to foot massagers. Demand for the much-anticipated console has far outstripped supply across the UK, with all major retailers presently reporting dwindling or depleted stocks. Launch day on November 19 saw the websites of retailers GAME and John Lewis to crash -- while Currys PC World's virtual queue amassed some 120,000 shoppers. Meanwhile, opportunistic profiteers who had succeeded in securing a PS5 have started scalping the consoles online -- with some going on eBay for twice the RRP.

Artificial intelligence is being increasingly used to classify employees, and there's a growing fear ... [ ] it might be used to classify people in other respects. These are only a small handful of the most well-known uses of artificial intelligence, yet there is one that, despite being on the margins for much of AI's recent history, is now threatening to grow significantly in prominence. This is AI's ability to classify and rank people, to separate them according to whether they're "good" or "bad" in relation to certain purposes. At the moment, Western civilization hasn't reached the point where AI-based systems are used en masse to categorize us according to whether we're likely to be "good" employees, "good" customers, "good" dates and "good" citizens. Nonetheless, all available indicators suggest that we're moving in this direction, and that this is regardless of whether Western nations consciously decide to construct the kinds of social credit system currently being developed by China.

Artificial intelligence is being increasingly used to classify employees, and there's a growing fear it might be used to classify people in other respects. These are only a small handful of the most well-known uses of artificial intelligence, yet there is one that, despite being on the margins for much of AI's recent history, is now threatening to grow significantly in prominence. This is AI's ability to classify and rank people, to separate them according to whether they're "good" or "bad" in relation to certain purposes. At the moment, Western civilization hasn't reached the point where AI-based systems are used en masse to categorize us according to whether we're likely to be "good" employees, "good" customers, "good" dates and "good" citizens. Nonetheless, all available indicators suggest that we're moving in this direction, and that this is regardless of whether Western nations consciously decide to construct the kinds of social credit system currently being developed by China.

Artificial intelligence is being increasingly used to classify employees, and there's a growing fear it might be used to classify people in other respects. These are only a small handful of the most well-known uses of artificial intelligence, yet there is one that, despite being on the margins for much of AI's recent history, is now threatening to grow significantly in prominence. This is AI's ability to classify and rank people, to separate them according to whether they're'good' or'bad' in relation to certain purposes. At the moment, Western civilization hasn't reached the point where AI-based systems are used en masse to categorize us according to whether we're likely to be'good' employees, 'good' customers, 'good' dates and'good' citizens. Nonetheless, all available indicators suggest that we're moving in this direction, and that this is regardless of whether Western nations consciously decide to construct the kinds of social credit system currently being developed by China.

These are only a small handful of the most well-known uses of artificial intelligence, yet there is one that, despite being on the margins for much of AI's recent history, is now threatening to grow significantly in prominence. This is AI's ability to classify and rank people, to separate them according to whether they're'good' or'bad' in relation to certain purposes. At the moment, Western civilization hasn't reached the point where AI-based systems are used en masse to categorize us according to whether we're likely to be'good' employees, 'good' customers, 'good' dates and'good' citizens. Nonetheless, all available indicators suggest that we're moving in this direction, and that this is regardless of whether Western nations consciously decide to construct the kinds of social credit system currently being developed by China. This risk was highlighted at the end of September, when it emerged that an AI-powered system was being used to screen job candidates in the UK for the first time.

Artificial intelligence is being increasingly used to classify employees, and there's a growing fear ... [ ] it might be used to classify people in other respects. These are only a small handful of the most well-known uses of artificial intelligence, yet there is one that, despite being on the margins for much of AI's recent history, is now threatening to grow significantly in prominence. This is AI's ability to classify and rank people, to separate them according to whether they're'good' or'bad' in relation to certain purposes. At the moment, Western civilization hasn't reached the point where AI-based systems are used en masse to categorize us according to whether we're likely to be'good' employees, 'good' customers, 'good' dates and'good' citizens. Nonetheless, all available indicators suggest that we're moving in this direction, and that this is regardless of whether Western nations consciously decide to construct the kinds of social credit system currently being developed by China.