Somewhere between Running Man and Rococop?

Nope, but we don't live in a society anything like that.

It's only a matter of time...

I never had you down as such a Panglossian optimist.

I am far from Naive, and if I thought for one second you had ever read any Voltaire I would be amazed.

I’ve read Candide. Slim volume, and a lightness of tone easy for my tiny mind to process.

You read it?

Yes, a while ago now. I also tried Chaucer at roughly the same time, very difficult to read. I don't read anywhere near as much as I used to, but I don't travel as much nowadays.

I don't share your view that AI is the future, ultimately AI (in its current form) is simply an extension of the individual(s) that program it.

We’re a way off sentient AI, I agree.

But machine learning means we’re beyond stuff just being programmed by people.

People often think first about the impact of driverless vehicles, and the impact that’ll have on people who drive for a living, for example. But a fair proportion of share trading is done by algorithms now. Their use as virtual assistants is widespread and they decide what videos YouTube recommends for you. One day in the not too distant they might be prescribing you medicines or providing adaptive, interactive tuition. They’re moving from processing data to interpreting and summarising it, which is the main part of my work.

But they must be interpreting/summarising based on something programmed?

So, my very, very basic lay person understanding is that machine learning doesn’t require programming, but instead a training set.

So when we were asked to prove we were not a bot when accessing a website, by selecting all the squares containing a road sign, we were helping to create a training set for a self-driving car. Presumably there are now algorithms that can recognise road signs, thanks to our efforts, so that security feature for weeding out bots has become redundant.

The training sets are used to test automatically generated, pretty much random algorithms. Millions of them. And most of them are rubbish. But if you pick the best 1%... well, they’ll still be rubbish. But if you use them as the basis to generate millions more and pick the best 1% of them, survival of the fittest style, and so on, and so on... you get there.

So I guess the human input is in creating the environment and providing the nutrients (the training set), but the algorithm evolves more than being programmed. For the latest game machine learning for Chess and Go, I think the machine created its own training set. Rather than being fed loads of games from top human players, and learning to mimic them super efficiently, it started from scratch playing against itself.