Artificial intelligence can now decipher irony and satire, and that's not funny. It is not funny anymore. Artificial intelligence, we are told, can now make out when its interlocutor is being sarcastic. That AI can be smart was evident when two chat-bots created their own coded language that left humans fuming, while guessing. It is precisely these smarts that finally could end up in the kind of scenario in which ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER tells us, against a background of fiery destruction, that he will be back. Of course, we cannot run scared of AI . We positively love it, when it is used to make life simpler, as when an insurance startup in the US deployed AI to process a claim and settle it in a matter of seconds on a holiday. But the worry that what is sauce for insurance might be one's goose getting cooked in another context continues to niggle. The trouble is not just that machines are getting smarter. Smarter machines allow humans to get dumber a...