Eighty years after Alan Turing launched the digital age, the revolutionary consequences continue to unfold. The changes are so relentless and powerful that they have given rise to competing utopian and dystopian narratives. According to one view, smart machines will usher in unparalleled productivity, prosperity, longevity, and leisure time; on the competing view, smart machines will crush workers, drive wealth to top 0.0001% and end privacy.

About the Turing: The Alan Turing Institute, headquartered in the British Library, London, was created as the national institute for data science in 2015. In 2017, as a result of a government recommendation, we added artificial intelligence to our remit. The Institute is named in honour of Alan Turing (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), whose pioneering work in theoretical and applied mathematics, engineering and computing are considered to be the key disciplines comprising the fields of data science and artificial intelligence.