Our first paper in this issue comes from Gary Lea, writing about artificial intelligence. We have published other papers on this subject of late and several book reviews, but Lea’s paper is rather different. He argues that, far from being the definitive rational approach to doing things that many assume, artificial intelligence involves choices. As social scientists are generally well aware and as engineers often are not, choice is influenced by bias and involves risk. The game of chess is often presented as the stage for the contest of man against machine, but chess is actually far from the battle of logic and intelligence commonly imagined. Artificial intelligence is indeed a battleground, but of research groups, companies and countries struggling against each other.