With robots greeting delegates at the entrance to the venue, the AI for Good Global Summit opened on Thursday in Geneva, bringing together thousands of participants from all sectors around the world to discuss the hopes and fears about artificial intelligence (AI) development.

Organised by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the annual forum is the place where humans meet artificial intelligence. It is popular to the extent of being oversubscribed for attendance, with the queue to enter stretched for hundreds of metres, along one of Geneva's biggest conference centres, and internet bandwidth barely coping with the flood of digital information.