What the near future of artificial intelligence could be.

When Microsoft unleashed Tay, its AI-powered chatbot, on Twitter on 23 March 2016, the software giant's hope was that it would "engage and entertain people… through casual and playful conversation". An acronym for'thinking about you', Tay was designed to mimic the language patterns of a 19-year-old American girl and learn by interacting with human users on the social network. Within hours, things had gone badly wrong. Trolls tweeted politically incorrect phrases at the bot in a bid to manipulate its behaviour. Sure enough, Tay started spewing out racist, sexist and other inflammatory messages to its following of more than 100,000 users. Microsoft was forced to lock the @TayandYou account indefinitely less than a day later, but not before its creation had tweeted more than 96,000 times.

Cyber-attacks are rarely out of the headlines. We know state actors, terrorists, and criminals can leverage cyber-means to target the digital infrastructures of our societies. We have also learned that, insofar as our societies grow dependent on digital technologies, they become more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. There is no shortage of examples, ranging from the 2007 attacks against Estonia digital services and 2008 cyber-attack against a nuclear power plant in Georgia to WannaCry and NotPetya, two ransomware attacks that encrypted data and demanded ransom payments, and the ransomware cyber-attack on the US Colonial Pipeline, a US oil pipeline system that provides fuel to South-eastern States. My work focuses mostly on state vs state cyber-attacks.

Did you know Mariarosaria Taddeo, the Deputy Director of the Oxford Internet Institute's Digital Ethics Lab, is speaking at TNW2020 this year? Check out her session on'Shaping the future of AI: International policy outlook' here. Artificial intelligence is increasingly affecting our everyday lives. The field has the potential to make the world a healthier, wealthier, and more efficient place. But it also poses vast safety and security risks.

You can rest easy; superintelligent artificial intelligence like HAL 3000 and the Terminator will forever remain fiction. Speaking at a recent artificial intelligence seminar, Dr Mariarosaria Taddeo, research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, said AI will never think for itself. "There are lots of very good sci-fi movies to watch on a Friday night," she said. "But there is not a shred of proper research that supports the idea that AI can become sentient. "This is technology that behaves as if it were intelligent, but that is nothing to do with creating or deducing.

Whether it's robots coming to take your job or AI being used in military drones, there is no shortage of horror stories about artificial intelligence. Yet for all the potential it has to do harm, AI might have just as much potential to be a force for good in the world. Harnessing the power for good will require international cooperation, and a completely new approach to tackling difficult ethical questions, the authors of an editorial published in the journal Science argue. "From diagnosing cancer and understanding climate change to delivering risky and consuming jobs, AI is already showing its potential for good," says Mariarosaria Taddeo, deputy director of the Digital Ethics Lab at Oxford University and one of the authors of the commentary. "The question is how can harness this potential?"