The other day, my pal John Ellis, the insatiably curious and perspicacious polymath behind the indispensable News Items, published a post under the headline I’m Sorry, Dave; You Can’t Do That—a slightly revised version of a famous piece of dialogue spoken by HAL 9000, the sentient supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. As you may have surmised, Ellis’s post concerned artificial intelligence: the mind-bending pace at which A.I. is advancing, the A.I. arms race unfolding between the U.S. and China, and our staggering lack of preparedness for the scale of the changes that A.I. is about to hit us with, and the risk that it could all go wrong… very wrong.