Alison Rowat considers the upsides and downsides of Artificial Intelligence and wonders what comes next

Trade in end-of-the-world scenarios is booming. From predictions of a global stock market crash to a third world war, it’s apocalypse now, now, now, wherever you turn. But how will we know when humanity’s number is truly up?

Handily, we were given a glimpse into how it could happen this week. I am here to tell you that when the world as we know it ends, we’ll probably be watching Blue Lights on the other channel. Did you see it this week? Holy moley, it’s good.

While we were engrossed in the goings-on in the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Channel 4 Dispatches was investigating the downsides of artificial intelligence (AI). Will AI Take My Job pitted a GP, a fashion photographer, a solicitor, and a musician against machines to see who, or what, came out on top. It was chilling viewing.

Earlier on Monday, we had another look into the future when Amazon Web Services suffered an “outage”, whatever that is. I was imagining some giant, grotesquely overloaded plug socket blowing up in Silicon Valley, but apparently AWS is a storage facility. Millions of internet users were temporarily unable to access sites such as Snapchat, Lloyds, and Fortnite. No biggie, you might think, but for some,........

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