Artificial intelligence will not only take away jobs but also create them

AI is bound to open up new opportunities, just like the automobile, the telephone and the internet did

One of Molière’s plays, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (The Middle-class Gentleman), features a social climber who is delighted to discover that he’s been speaking prose all his life. Most of us would feel that way about artificial intelligence (AI) if we only realised how often we use it.

The commonest connection is via smartphones. Smartphones have virtual personal assistants (VPA) like Siri, Cortana or Google Assistant. When you ask the VPA to do something, it uses AI to recognise your voice, decipher your accent, follow orders and answer questions.

One of AI’s breakthroughs has been the creation of VPAs, which need