Netflix's darkly addictive sci-fi series Black Mirror claims to show the'twisted, high-tech' of the near-future, but several technologies featured in the drama-filled episodes can already be found in our lives today. These include killer robot dogs, a social credit rating system and autonomous pizza delivery. In one of the most memorable recent episodes, 'The Entire History of You,' a contact lens featured a built-in camera that allowed humans to re-watch their memories. The concept is less futuristic than you might think, because Google may be already working on a similar device, while a startup is set to unleash a VR application that enables you to relive your experiences in a digital world, and Snapchat has released a device to capture memories. And let us not forget the second episode in the third series, when an augmented reality tester dies in both the natural and digital worlds.

It's a cold winter day in Detroit, but the sun is shining bright. Robert Williams decided to spend some quality time rolling on his house's front loan with his two daughters. Suddenly, police officers appeared from nowhere and brought to an abrupt halt a perfect family day. Robert was ripped from the arms of his crying daughters without an explanation, and cold handcuffs now gripped his hands. The police took him away in no time! His family were left shaken in disbelief at the scene which had unfolded in front of their eyes. What followed for Robert were 30 long hours in police custody.

Today, states and their actors are waging a digital cold war with artificial intelligence systems at the heart of the fight. In T-Minus AI, the US Air Force’s first Chairperson for Artificial Intelligence, Michael Kanaan examines the emergence of AI as a tool for maintaining and expanding State power. Russia, for example, is pushing for AI in every aspect of its military complex, while China, as you can see in the excerpt below, has taken a more holistic approach, with the technology infiltrating virtually all strata of Chinese society.

Chinese citizens will soon have to start using facial identification in order to sign up for internet services or get a new mobile number. The Chinese government announced last month that residents applying for a new mobile or internet device will have their faces scanned by telecommunications carriers. The new rules will apply from December 1. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), which is the state agency responsible for internet and technology regulation, wrote that the decision was part of its moves to "safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of citizens in the cyberspace" and prevent fraud, according to Quartz. Recent reports indicate that China has around 854 million internet users.

Ask a layman about artificial intelligence and they might point to sci-fi villains such as HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey or the Terminator. But the co-founders of the AI Now Institute, Meredith Whittaker and Kate Crawford, want to change the conversation. Instead of talking about far-flung super-intelligent AI, they argued on the latest episode of Recode Decode, we should be talking about the ways AI is affecting people right now, in everything from education to policing to hiring. Rather than killer robots, you should be concerned about what happens to your résumé when it hits a program like the one Amazon tried to build. "They took two years to design, essentially, an AI automatic résumé scanner," Crawford said. "And they found that it was so biased against any female applicant that if you even had the word'woman' on your résumé that it went to the bottom of the pile." That's a classic example of what Crawford calls "dirty data." Even though people think of algorithms as being ...

All of China's 1.4 billion citizens are about to be put under greater scrutiny as the country prepares to launch its'social credit score' scheme. The project rates citizens based on their behaviour, and those who do not play by the rules are added to a list that prohibits them from certain luxuries. Fears are growing regarding the ethical implications of scheme, with some questioning the morality of the big-brother culture. The government is likely to use its rapidly growing surveillance network to enforce the system, with some academics growing concerned that it may be manipulated to enforce the ideology of the ruling Communist party. Completing community service and buying Chinese products is thought to improve it whereas fraud, tax evasion and smoking in non-smoking areas can drop it.

I have a great deal of respect for the vision of Mr. Elon Musk, (Tesla, SpaceX) and have even become something of a SpaceX groupie, watching the SpaceX youtube streaming of every (yes, every) launch. For the last few years, he has been quite vocal about his fears of AI! And many others have joined in with him. Having spent the better part of 40 years in deep IT (Information Technology), I have become somewhat jaded to the alarmist views of these sorts, in documentaries, and Sci-Fi flicks. You know the score, man builds a machine, machine becomes conscious, and attacks its creator; just as the angels and man himself is supposed to have rebelled against their creator (Paradise Lost(1667), John Milton).