As with those previous technologies, there are many people warning loudly about AI’s power and potential disuse. One of them is Geoffrey Hinton, an early computer science pioneer whose work on neural networks underpin AI, and who quit his job at Google this week. He told The New York Times: “I don’t think they should scale this up more until they have understood whether they can control it,” citing fears that the average internet user might soon “not be able to know what is true anymore.”

Is Hinton right? Or will he be remembered alongside the people who told us that the invention of the typewriter would ruin romance?