No 1960s vision of the 21st century was complete without an attentive robot-scuttling around doing household chores. At the time, automation went about as far as the Goblin Teasmade — an unwieldy alarm clock programmed to wake its owner with a-gentle hissing and freshly made cup of tea. It seemed logical that the next step would be fully mechanised homes.
Yet, not for the first time, the future failed to arrive on time. Domestic robots turned out to be a disruptive technology that disrupted nothing except the retirement plans of those who had invested in them. We have even gone back to brewing our morning tea — while an original-Goblin Teasmade now sits in a display case at the Science Museum.
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) has been applied to quite different areas. When Netflix-recommends a film based on what it knows about your tastes, when an internet shopping channel instantly calculates how much it thinks you are worth to it, that is AI.
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