We were able to identify vaccine candidates that would be effective against the virus really, really quickly - in a matter of weeks - because companies like Moderna had invested quite heavily in AI-based platforms for discovering such candidates.

As Prof Wooldridge points out, there have been dramatic advances in AI over the last decade, from instant translation to image recognition - even if the robot butlers we were promised have yet to arrive. But our worries have too often focused on the wrong dangers - that the technology will achieve consciousness and kill us, or that robots will cause mass unemployment.

"The new space race at the geopolitical level is for computational power. Who can gather the most data and process that data the fastest? That is why both China and the US, frankly the EU as well, are spending a lot of money on quantum computers, incredibly fast supercomputers. And all of these things require chips," she explains.

If there's one area where there's real excitement about the improvements in our lives which advances in artificial intelligence could bring, it is healthcare. On Tech Tent this week we ask whether, amidst all the hope and hype, real innovations are beginning to transform the way patients are treated. At Oxford University's Said Business School, some of the leading thinkers in AI research - from the university and beyond - gathered this week. There were fascinating discussions about everything from autonomous cars to the way AI is transforming the finance industry. But the panels on healthcare drew big crowds and a sense that researchers were on the cusp of delivering concrete results which will soon begin to be seen in hospitals.

Computers are getting ever better at recognising different faces - but on this week's Tech Tent we ask whether facial recognition technology is just too big a threat to privacy. That is certainly the view of the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU. This week the rights group urged Amazon to stop providing its Rekognition facial recognition technology to American police forces, saying a guide for the software "reads like a user manual for authoritarian surveillance". Amazon responded robustly, saying the quality of life would be much worse if new technologies were blocked because of how they might be used. But Matt Cagle, technology and civil liberties lawyer for the ACLU in California, says the tech firm has unlocked something really dangerous: "This technology can be turned against protesters - it can be targeted at immigrants, and it can be used to spy on entire neighbourhoods."

On this week's Tech Tent we hear why China's determination to be a leading player in artificial intelligence could lead to tensions with the United States. We have two other reports on this week's programme.

On this week's Tech Tent we hear why China's determination to be a leading player in artificial intelligence could lead to tensions with the United States. We have two other reports on this week's programme. Her victory is being seen as a key moment in the battle against the internet scourge known as revenge porn. And in a report from Rahul Tandon in Kolkata, we find out why India's new Aadhaar biometric identity card scheme has become mired in controversy. For millions of people who have struggled to open a bank account or get access to government services without proof of identity, it has proved life-changing.

In 2017 AI was everywhere, so in the last edition of Tech Tent for this year we set off to explore artificial intelligence. What is it, where is it making rapid progress, and what are the dangers for society if we get it wrong? For all the excitement about the supposedly rapid advance in creating intelligent machines, there are now plenty of dissident voices arguing that AI is overhyped. "The most rapid'progress' in so-called AI has been by downgrading what is considered AI so that any old algorithm or machine learning is said to be "intelligent". Our two special guests think wonderful things are happening in this field but agree that there is a problem in defining AI. "Everyone has a different definition and it's been constantly changing since the 1960s," says Tabitha Goldstaub, co-founder of the AI consultancy Cognitio She says computers have made great progress in some aspects of human intelligence, learning by experience in the same way a child does, to excel in tasks such as being able to distinguish between different human faces. But they then struggle with more arbitrary questions - AI is very good at doing a defined task better than a human but still isn't able to understand the logic that a baby can."

Was this the week that the space age vision of a car that drives itself became a reality? And are claims that artificial intelligence can transform healthcare a bit overhyped? On this week's Tech Tent podcast we explore the potential and limits of technology in health and transport. This week we woke up to the fact that autonomous cars could be with us sooner than we thought. That was the message from John Krafcik, chief executive of Waymo, the self-driving car division of Google - or Alphabet as we must learn to call it.

From driverless cars to smartphone apps offering instant translation, the evidence of rapid progress in artificial intelligence is now clear to see. On this week's Tech Tent we report on two tech giants, Facebook and Baidu, which are spending heavily on artificial intelligence research. And we meet the man who was among the first to predict just how disruptive the automation revolution was going to be. When a book called The Second Machine Age was published in 2014 it had a far greater impact than most academic works. But the timing of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's book about the wave of automation sweeping through the workplace was perfect, as the world woke up to the rapid progress of computing and robotics and grew anxious about it.