The thought struck me a few days ago as I was watching a YouTube video on potential doomsday scenarios for humanity whilst I was cooking dinner. The video, of course, posited the usual candidates - another Permian-type mass extinction event, nuclear war, climate change - and then the typical 'an AI that turns evil, views humans as a disease of enemy and wipes us out'. I've heard this a hundred or more times before and therefore barely even listened to the entry...and then found myself struck by a thought that made me stop and think. It's actually a thought I'd toyed with many times before; what if an AI was benevolent instead of evil? Where has this Skynet-style cliché of a malicious Artificial Intelligence actually come from? At first I thought back to an idea I'd had a few months ago for a simple fiction story. It goes something like; ' An AI is developed that actually acts entirely benevolently - it creates a solution to race problems, to cancer, to nucl...