I hope that I’m not around to witness “the Singularity”. This is a spooky point in the future at which artificial intelligence (AI) is predicted to surpass human intelligence. Just as the term “singularity” is used to describe a black hole and the meltdown of the laws of physics within it, an intelligence singularity is similarly supposed to lead to unprecedented weirdness.

Why? Because the ultra-intelligent machines that we create, it is fancied, will go on to create even smarter machines. This process could result in an exponential explosion in intelligence that will relegate people to the status of an amoeba or, perhaps, a domestic cat. It is not a flippant analogy: some academics envisage that super-intelligent machines will one day keep human beings as pets.

So concerned are some scientists that they get together every year to discuss it. This year’s Singularity Summit took place at Stanford University in California, featuring an array of serious-minded speakers, mostly plucked from the field of AI. Here, the buzz seemed to be around “general AI” or AGI, the kind of intelligence that you and I have. We spend our early years learning some basic stuff, and the rest of our lives building on that knowledge to learn how to do other things. In essence, we learn how to learn. Robots tend not to do that – they just learn, and they have to be taught every step of the way.

IBM revealed its plans to build a robot that learns how to learn, by modelling its software on the brain of a child. The company has named its putative creation Joshua Blue (it/he belongs on the same family tree as Deep Blue, the chess-playing computer). IBM engineers believe that, for a machine to develop any sense of meaning about the world – as a child does by the age of three – it must be imbued, as children are, with both a sense of superstition and forgetfulness.

I’m really quite awed at the prospect of Joshua coming to life. Aren’t human toddlers scary enough?

Reason No 44 not to go to work: travelling underground possibly damages the lungs. Biologists at Inserm (National Institute for Health and Medical Research) in Paris collected dust samples from the Métro and then wafted them towards both living mice and cultured mouse cells. The dust caused lung inflammation and triggered the production of cytokines, which show the immune system is under the cosh.

Slowly pulling up alongside intelligent design in the race of unfeasible scientific ideas is creation algebra. Check out the syllabus from a Baptist school in Texas: “Students will examine the nature of God as they progress in their understanding of mathematics. Students will understand the absolute consistency of mathematical principles and know that God was the inventor of that consistency.” Should they have the misfortune to proceed to calculus, they will also discover that He has a foul sense of humour.

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