India, Sept. 15 -- A ten-year-old girl in a village school drew the solar system and wrote, 'This is our home.' She is the reason I spent years writing about Artificial Intelligence - and why I believe the next decade belongs to all of us, or to none of us

Years ago, in a village school in Jharkhand, in eastern India, I stood beside the desk of a girl of about ten. Her notebook was open. On one page she had drawn the solar system - the sun at the centre, the planets in their careful orbits - and next to the Earth, in her own small handwriting, she had written: "This is our home."

There was confidence on that page. There was curiosity in that child. There was a future waiting to be opened. And there was, if you looked honestly, an injust...