The age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has arrived, though not so much an age of sentient robots as one of ubiquitous data collection and analysis fuelling automated decisions, categorisations, predictions, and recommendations in all walks of life. The stakes of AI-enabled decision-making may be as serious as life and death (Spanish police use a system called VioGén to forecast domestic violence) or as trivial as the arrangement of pizza-toppings.

AI is a loose category that describes all kinds of automated decision-making systems. Techniques range from relatively simple logic-based algorithms (if A and B, then C) to complex ‘deep learning’, where brain-like neural networks refine and optimise predictions and categorisations derived from unstructured data.