Our artificially intelligent future, which is rapidly arriving, is none of these conscious robots with lethal ambition. Our AI future is much more mundane and much more insidious.

This should not be a surprise. Hints of this future were predicted very early in the day. In 1909, for example, in a short story titled The Machine Stops, the great EM Forster painted a prophetic picture of our digital future. The story gets a lot right. It predicts globalisation, the internet, videoconferencing and many other aspects of our current digital reality, from more than a century ago. It is a haunting tale of a high-tech haven that hurtles towards a horrifying bloody halt. Without noticing, humans in the story become so dependent on the technology mediating their society that society itself breaks when the machines do.