From chatbots to self-driving cars: what worries people about machine learning?

Utopian and dystopian visions of an AI-dominated future are everywhere, from films to tech company press releases. But what are people really concerned about? The Royal Society created a public dialogue to find out

When we don't know much about a new technology, we talk in generalisations. Those generalisations are often also extreme: the utopian drives of those who are developing it on one hand, and the dystopian visions that help society look before it leaps on the other.

These tensions are true for machine learning, the set of techniques that enables much of what we currently think of as Artificial Intelligence. But, as the Royal Society's recently published report Machine learning: the power and promise of computers that learn by example showed, we are already at the point where we can do better than the generalisations; give members of the public the opportunity to interrogate the "experts" and explore the future, and they come up with nuanced expectations in which context is everything.