My favourite book is Anna Karenina. In the dying days of Tsarist Russia, trains carried the force of modernity—the unstoppable symbol of a new age pressing against the old world. Trains were the technology that brought the future whether people wanted it or not. Now, when I step onto a long-distance train in Australia, it feels almost the reverse: an anachronism, a left-over from an earlier era. There’s a strange irony, therefore, in taking a train to give talks about artificial intelligence.

There’s a romantic charm to the rhythm of train travel. I sometimes fancy myself a wandering preacher of a bygone age, turning up in a town to speak for a night or two before moving on. There’s a Jewish tradition of the maggid—a teacher who travelled from community to community with stories and lessons—and I like the thought of carrying ideas that way, in motion.