Artificial intelligence has been a familiar concept at least since the talking computer in the original Star Trek (1966), and the malfunctioning HAL-9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, a ‘character’ written with what now looks like considerable prescience by Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Douglas Adams humanised AI with a depressive robot, Marvin the Paranoid Android, and an elevator which sulked in the bottom of the lift shaft in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978), and the term AI itself has been in mainstream use at least since Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film of the same name.
For over decade now we’ve grown used to AIs like Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri
