Daniel Dennett: ‘I begrudge every hour I have to spend worrying about politics’

You quote your colleague who suggests the Google autocomplete, which uses AI and machine learning, could be controlling the way that we see the world. Is that what you think? That the robots are already controlling our minds in ways we don’t yet realise?

Yes, we’re beginning to furnish ourselves with technological oracles. We will be able to prove that they give very accurate results, results that we don’t have any other way of getting. We also know that we can’t understand how they do it. People talk about black-box science. It’s not just news. It’s not just politics. It’s science.