Off Topic: Artificial intelligence, and the computers coming to a future near you

This week’s Off Topic looks at the world of Artificial Intelligence. Fionn Davenport remains optimistic about the role to be played by our future robot overlords, while Laurence Mackin says he’ll be hiding under the stairs from Skynet.

In the first part of the show, we discuss Channel 4’s Humans, which places AI synths in an all-too-familiar domestic setting, and explores what happens when we have robots that think and act just like us – and what we are likely to ask them to do. TV critic Bernice Harrison and media columnist Laura Slattery are fans of the show and join the fray. Let the robot wars begin.

One of the most disturbing and intriguing parts of Humans is its approach to sex – which is also what is at the heart of TV series The Affair. As it ends its first series, we ask, is this the best depiction of a relationship on current TV? And why would anyone have an affair with Dominic West when there is Joshua Jackson to go home to?

In the second part of the show, AI theorist Tim Urban and Ian Brunswick from Dublin’s Science Gallery discuss how close we are to computers as smart as humans (the answer is very close indeed). We wonder what the near future will be like, and discuss the likelihood, proposed by some experts, that supercomputers will evolve themselves in mere minutes, before we can do anything to stop them.