Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt take on AI

The Age of AI. By Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher. Little, Brown and Company; 272 pages; $30. John Murray; £20

Early last year, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit) used a machine-learning algorithm to look for new antibiotics. After training the system on molecules with antimicrobial properties, they let it loose on huge databases of compounds and found one that worked. Because it operated in a different way, even bacteria that had developed a resistance to traditional antibiotics could not evade the new drug.