Welcome to Hard Talk from the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

As a kid, my guest today loved to build things with Lego bricks.

Neil Lawrence's father was a mechanical engineer, and young Neil thought he would follow the same path.

But along the way, he got diverted, away from material engineering, into the world of computer engineering.

He's now professor of machine learning at the University of Cambridge, senior AI fellow at the Alan Turing Institute,

and author of a book, The Atomic Human, which digs deep into the transformational potential

of artificial intelligence, while also reflecting on the qualities of the human mind that can

never be replicated even by the most sophisticated computer. As more and more aspects of our

lives are impacted by the rollout of AI, as control of big data and the development of algorithms to exploit it becomes a source of immense power in the 21st century, tech futurists are divided. Should we embrace AI or fear it? In the end, what matters most isn't the technology? It's the humans who develop and deploy it. Should we have faith in ourselves to get it right? Well, Neil Lawrence joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk. Thank you very much for having me.

It's a great pleasure to have you. Now, you are a computer scientist, but it seems to me as you've journeyed deep into the potentiality of artificial intelligence,

you've also thought a great deal about human intelligence and what is so very special and unique about us humans.

Can you try to put that into words? Yeah, I think for me,

what we've seen with a lot of the artificial intelligence debate has been a sort of naturally

narcissistic tendency to think about our intelligence. And what I think it does is offers the

opportunity to introspect about our intelligence, to stand in a different place, to look at a different type of information processing, that that's done by a computer, and use our understanding of that, which we built and created, so we understand it, to look back and think about what's special about us.

Is intelligence the right word to use when it comes to discussing what machines can do in this digital data-driven era?

It's a really good question.

And my mind changes a little bit about it either way. I think the problem with the word

is we tend to think of intelligence as something very particular to us and the nature of machine

intelligence is nothing to do with us. So if we want to use the word intelligence for machines,

then I think there's a question about, well, should we use the word

intelligence for our ecology, which is also an information processing ecosystem.

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