In the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, a submarine crew is shrunken to microscopic size and injected into the bloodstream of a defector to remove a blood clot from his brain. Critics agreed that it was an entertaining movie but that the impossible premise took some swallowing.
Last month John McNamara, a leading IT specialist at IBM’s research and development laboratory in Hursley, Hampshire, suggested to the House of Lords Artificial Intelligence Committee that within 20 years ‘We may see AI nano-machines being injected into our bodies. These will provide huge medical benefits, such as being able to repair damage to cells, muscles and bones — perhaps even augment them.’
We now read daily in newspapers the sort of stories once found only in the pages of the most fantastical science fiction novels. ‘AI becomes world’s best Go player in just three days’; ‘Self-driving cars could run on unlit roads to conserve energy’; ‘Robot behaviour is creeping beyond our control.’
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