I attended a seminar at Cannes Lions last week where Tim Berners-Lee, (the inventor of the World Wide Web) painted an eerily believable scenario for the future of Artificial Intelligence.

Berners-Lee believes that society is safe from AIs for as long as robots are subservient to us. We need to write the rules that ensure that sentient machines work for us rather than allowing ourselves to become enslaved by them. The only real dangers emerge, he believes, when robots are given the same rights as human being… and he doesn’t foresee anyone willingly granting robots such rights.

Berners-Lee encourages us not to think of a world in which Artificial Intelligence necessarily takes the form of humanoid robots. Most AI today exists in the form of algorithms and intelligent software systems. We can all imagine a future in which Artificial Intelligence is used to assist in the business world. It is conceivable, for example, that we will utilise intelligent software systems to establish companies, buy shares into those companies, and essentially create wealth on our behalf.

But this is where the danger comes in. While Berners-Lee is confident that we will never purposefully grant robots the same rights as human beings, in the USA corporations already have the same rights as individuals and, by extension, society could “unwittingly” grant such rights to AIs.

The complex web of cause and effect outlined in this scenario is a great illustration of how we may end up outmanoeuvring ourselves. One has to wonder whether there isn’t already some latent sentient presence urging us in that direction. It certainly seems like there is some unseen hand shifting us towards this inevitability.