Artificial intelligence is the hot subject in Davos this week. The companies that pay for the annual World Economic Forum shindig in the Swiss Alps are pushing it hard. There is a huge billboard from Tata Consultancy Services proclaiming that “The Future is AI”; one of the big buildings has been temporarily renamed AI House; and a number of the high-tech giants including Intel have put AI slogans on their bases for the event.

Why? Well, the basic answer is that is where the global business community thinks it can make the most money over the next decade or so, and no one wants to be left behind. In the past few days, Microsoft’s association with OpenAI has helped propel it past Apple to become the world’s most valuable company. Its founder Bill Gates, now not involved in the company, has just done a fascinating interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, in which he predicted that AI will make everyone’s lives easier.

For example, it could help doctors do their paperwork, which is “part of the job they don’t like, we can make that very efficient”. He also said that the improvements with OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 were “dramatic” because it can “essentially read and write”. So it was “almost like having a white collar worker to be a tutor, to give health advice, to help write code, to help with technical support calls”.

Of course there are scary stories coming out by the score. The latest one is that not only can AI clone people’s voices and create fake videos, it can also mimic their handwriting. The long-established device used to verify identity, a signature, looks in danger; the newer one of using a........

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