Today the BBC fell into the common trap of unnecessary hyperbole and concern around AI.

Starting with confusing robotics and AI (two vastly different subsets of computing), the interview ended in an interviewee asserting that Israel have some form of killing machines that can identify enemy targets without human intervention.

For a start, there was no mention of war conventions (human intervention is required in war!), and we should remember that machines that kills without human intervention have been around for years. We might call such machines “bombs” and “mines”.

When the interviewee spoke about how the killing machines could be “scaled up like Google”, we are talking less about robot AI from the Terminator movie and more about mines across warzones in the last hundred years.

The reason this is so important is that people develop a fear of AI, what is possible and what is going to change.

We don’t expect BBC reporters to know everything about each topic covered on the Today programme, but surely they can do better than this?