Mum nodded. ‘He was, indeed. One of the greatest minds of the last couple of hundred years. He was worried about the future of artificial intelligence. He predicted, and it’s since come true, that advances in AI would bring about a revolution in machine thinking. Our human minds are slow. We evolve, but evolution takes a long, long time. Millions of years. What deep neural network AI learning does is reduce those millions of years of learning into weeks, days, hours … seconds, maybe. We just don’t know. And imagine a machine that can build a better version of itself and then a better version again and so on, all without human interference. We think we are so much more advanced than an ant. An AI machine could make us seem like intellectual ants in comparison to its mind.’

‘But a mind like that would solve all our problems.’

‘A mind like that probably wouldn’t notice our problems. When was the last time you worried about a problem an ant might be experiencing?’

‘You’re talking about evil machines. Aiden is not evil.’

‘I’m not talking evil. I’m talking overwhelming competence. If humans get in the way of that competence, there’s no telling what could happen. I suspect we’d be brushed aside. Like an ant.’

‘Aiden is not a super-intelligent machine. He’s just a boy.’

‘He is now,’ said Mum. ‘But I come back to what I said before. He has worked out a way to get past the restrictions I put on him. He’s out of control, Ashleigh. I have no idea what he could become, but I can guess it won’t be anything like the kind boy you’ve always known. And that’s why you should remember him that way. The brother who saved your life, rather than the advanced AI that destroyed humanity.’

‘This is stupid.’ I was panicking. I couldn’t argue against all these things. Me against possibly the world’s greatest expert on artificial intelligence? I’d hoped to find a crack in her logic but now I realised I hadn’t had a clue in the first place.

‘I was stupid,’ said Mum. ‘I was stupid to build him in the first place. I should’ve accepted that you would be an only child, like the vast majority of children brought into this world. But I wanted better for you. And I risked too much to make that happen. I was selfish. And now we’re all suffering because of it. I’m sorry, Ashleigh. I’m so sorry.’