I DO wonder, whenever I am asked to accept some kind of android update, whether there will come a time when these tech companies will target certain people with very specific updates that relate to their own particular circumstances. Perhaps a man with nonconformist beliefs will be gently steered in another direction, or someone who previously drank nothing but mint tea gradually discovers that he has acquired an inexplicable passion for Coca-Cola?

What if so-called Artificial Intelligence were to use algorithms to predict the future, based purely on one’s online behaviour and where it might be leading? Imagine if the authorities could use complex mathematical formulae to anticipate that two activists will end up in a relationship together and then raise children that shared their subversive ideals, thus threatening the status quo, or that a woman with politically incorrect opinions might become an outspoken university professor or dissident politician several years down the line.

In a fashion not dissimilar to the way detectives would travel back in time to eliminate ‘precrime’ in Philip K. Dick’s dystopian novel, The Minority Report (1956), AI technicians may wish to pre-empt the future by deliberately setting out to ruin blossoming relationships or arranging for the latest version of Alexa to set the house on fire, encourage an impressionable teenager to murder his anti-capitalist parents or convince somebody that opposition to Zionism is a form of insanity that requires an immediate course of medication.