When you hear the words "Artificial Intelligence" your mind might turn to science fiction – a vast army of robots with aspirations to rule over us – but we already experience AI in our lives every day. When Netflix recommends something we might like, Facebook recognises us in a picture or Spotify builds us a playlist, that's AI at work.

In the first episode of Actually Interesting, brought to you by Microsoft, I talk to AUT's Mahsa Mohaghegh and Microsoft big data and AI expert Chimene Bonhomme about what AI, algorithms and machine learning actually are – and what they imply for our future.

We also talk about the way that AI works is a product of the assumptions – conscious or unconscious – of the people who design the rules. (That's what algorithms are: sets of rules.) And the problems that can create when humans are teaching machines about the world.

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