The age of the driverless bus is coming – and we can't let developers take sole control

With the commercial sector providing most of the stimulus for advances in AI, we need to ensure societal goals and values are kept in sight

It's a bit like buses. You wait for one new technology to come along and then three arrive, presenting a range of exciting journeys and destinations, full of promises and possibilities. With rapid developments in genomics; in data and computer science; in neuroscience; and in the combinations that their convergence make possible, it is easy to feel simultaneously confused, excited and anxious. And at the centre of it all and supposedly orchestrating our future - driving the driverless bus, you might say - we have artificial intelligence (AI). Moving quickly in this area is Google's DeepMind with their multi-million dollar AI initiative, but they are not alone: there is also great interest from academia and huge investment from other parts of industry.

Artificial Intelligence has various definitions, but in general it means a program that uses data to build a model of some aspect of the world. This model is then used to make informed decisions and predictions about future events. The technology is used widely, to provide speech and face recognition, language translation, and personal recommendations on music, film and shopping sites. In the future, it could deliver driverless cars, smart personal assistants, and intelligent energy grids. AI has the potential to make organisations more effective and efficient, but the technology raises serious issues of ethics, governance, privacy and law.