A Point Of View

Howard Jacobson argues that talk of the dangers of artificial intelligence is premature. "The idea that if we feed enough lines of literature into a computer it will eventually be able to write its own Iliad", he writes, "is as preposterous as the old fancy that if a sufficient number of monkeys were given a sufficient number of Olivettis they would eventually hammer out a monkey Macbeth". Producer: Adele Armstrong.