Will AI exacerbate inequality? Can we stop that from happening? As the world grapples with guardrails to protect us from future dangers of AI, I thought it timely to talk to an ethicist who has lived and breathed these challenges for decades. Enter, Wendell Wallach, Carnegie-Uehiro fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs …

WENDELL WALLACH: That's what really concerns people who see gender bias and racial bias and so forth: the ‘existential risk’ is sucking the air out of the room and it's not letting us address the near-term things that we could actually address. One of the things we could address is just making the bloody people who deploy these things accountable ...

“I've never loved anyone the way I loved you,” Theodore Twombly tells Samantha, and Samantha, replies, “Me too. Now we know how.” It’s a soulful exchange from a beautiful movie – Her – and it leaves the viewer in no doubt that Theodore, played Joaquin Phoenix, is truly and deeply and go-to-sleep-dreamy, in love …

I’m calling neuromorphic computing the most important computer engineering research in the world, now and through the next 20 years. That’s right, more important than quantum computing (you heard it hear first!). Why? Because everything we want to do in the future of AI, everywhere we want to go long-term, is predicated on transitioning to …

ALEXANDRE MARCIREAU: So what really stands out I think for the brain is that it is a massively parallel 3D structure with those incredible connections. Part of the computation is in the very structure of the system. Ultimately, we'd like to build systems that are more like the brain …

It has become fashionable in recent times for doomsayers to talk of AI as an existential threat, by which they mean something akin to the malevolent Skynet system in The Terminator movie franchise that goes rogue and launches nukes to annihilate humanity. So, is such a nightmare a probable part of our future?

We’ve barely scratched the surface of the AI opportunity. The horizons are expanding at warp speed. Each time we approach the limits of today’s AI, the next step-change will open up new layers of opportunity. Everywhere I look, every industry, every business, every job function, I come up with endless lists of useful AI applications to boost efficiency, save money and improve outcomes …

What does it mean to make a robot conscious? I asked the roboticist doing it. Oh, and then we discussed robots taking care of each another, upgrading themselves, and reproducing! A mind-bending chat with the brilliant Hod Lipson, the BIG thinking founder of Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab …

Hod Lipson: We have this very human-centered belief that humans are special. A machine cannot have feelings. A machine cannot be creative. A machine cannot self-reproduce. For me, that's a call to action. And so one by one, I'm looking at these things …