New Delhi, March 1 -- The fear of artificial intelligence (AI) is so rampant now that it appears to be a matter of decorum to admit to this fear. People keep telling me AI is coming and that I should be scared. I'm very open to being scared, which I've always thought is a reasonable way of surviving life, but somehow I am not, and I have tried to understand why.

Also, I don't know what exactly I should be scared of, because there are two distinct fears.

One is of the end of the world. Earlier, people used to speak of lethal smart machines, but now they say that dumb machines can destroy the world-and not only through weapons, as a collection of tech luminaries feared just a few years ago in a signed petition. It is also what AI can do i...