Hollywood’s robots and computers still think like humans, whether they are playing Gandhi or Hitler. In reality, would they not think quite differently from us —- as aliens, in fact?

Only one film has ventured down this route and it comes from Russia, Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” (1972). Based on a novel by a Polish sci-fi writer, Stanislaw Lem, it imagines a world with a mind of its own that influences those who live there —- a world where drugs, religion and death itself are all relative and man’s perception is changed by an intelligence not his own. AI? If you believe AI could evolve at all, then an intelligence such as this could well exist. At least, in the movies.