Artificial intelligence will give us richer lives and shorter working days. I might have said the same about all previous technological advances, though they, too, were decried at the time as harbingers of mass unemployment. In the event, they all elevated the human condition for the same reason that AI will.

Let’s leave aside, for a moment, the question of whether AI might exterminate us. Quite an omission, admittedly, but the idea that we will be wiped out, Terminator-style, has always belonged to science fiction.