Do we really know the potential and the pitfalls of artificial intelligence? Maybe not, say the experts and innovators at the TED conference in Vancouver. Jane Wakefield hears from the creator of the infamous "fake Obama" videos, Dr Supasorn Suwajanakorn. And AI expert and pioneer Max Tegmark of MIT explains why we can't make any assumptions about the future, and must decide now how to navigate the problems of AI such as whether to ban autonomous weapons. Plus we hear from Pierre Barreau about his AI music, and why computers sometimes need reminding that human musicians need to take a breath.

Somewhere between my eighth and eighteenth turmeric lattes, I realized I was dangerously close to falling for TED. The annual conference, which gathers elite technologists, thought leaders, scientists, economists, futurists, visionaries, activists, physicists, poets, enthusiasts, academics, entertainers and billionaires has a binary reputation: For anyone who hasn't been, it's an object of easy mockery. For anyone who has, it's a religion. After five days in the garden of TED, downing blueberry mint kombucha, champagne gummy bears and green juice described as "good for when you feel like you're being chased by a cheetah," I had seen the light. The ideas felt exciting (flying cars!

Ludwig Wittgenstein once imagined that everyone had a box with something in it called a "beetle." Denying the possibility of private language, the philosopher wrote, "No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle." Wittgenstein meant that we learn a word by observing the rules governing its use, but no one sees another person's beetle: "It would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box," or nothing at all. An apparently intractable fact of life is that our thoughts are inaccessible to one another. Our skulls are like space helmets; we are trapped in our heads, unable to convey the quiddity of our sensations. But how much longer will our thoughts be truly private?