Jerry Kaplan was working on artificial intelligence long before we all started using it. He earned one of the first PhDs in the field, from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979, and went on to co-found several Silicon Valley companies. They include Teknowledge, one of the first firms to commercialise expert systems; GO Corporation, a pioneer of tablet computing; and the online auction site Onsale.

Today he teaches the social and economic impact of AI at Stanford. His book Humans Need Not Apply was named one of the Economist's top ten science and technology books of 2015. Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know and Generative Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know both became Amazon new-release bestsellers in the field.

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Chatbots, he tells Claire Lehmann, are like a dog that can bark but can't bite. AI agents are another matter. Drawing on nearly five decades in the field, Kaplan explains why he thinks the end-of-humanity scenarios don't hold up and what should actually worry us, from cybersecurity to product liability. They also discuss whether AI could ever be conscious, and why he believes the technology will make human craft more valuable, not less.