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Good morning. Whether it be in last night’s new series of Robot Wars or the 10 year old who on Friday patiently attempted to explain to me his tablet game Clash of Clans, there’s an inherent playfulness in the development of robotics and artificial intelligence. There are of course serious issues in this development. Just a few days ago the Government published its policy paper, A digital strategy for a digital economy, which looks at investment, infrastructure, innovation and skills development. Alongside this there’s fear that robots and AI will replace large numbers of the human workforce. In fact, Bill Gates in a recent interview suggested that robots should be taxed and the money used to retrain workers into new jobs in education or health care. Yet, in his new book Wonderland, Steven Johnson argues that social change happens primarily not in the struggles for survival or wealth but in play. For him, the pursuit of amusement and wonder is a key driver of technology that shapes the world. He comments, ‘You will find the future wherever people are having the most fun’. While other drivers are no doubt at work, this is an important reminder of the value of play to education, science and the economy. In the School of Engineering and Computer Sciences, colleagues here at Durham University are teaching robots to play football. This isn’t in the vain hope of boosting the North-east’s success in the Premier League but as a way of engaging students in three dimensional image processing and computation. As part of a project to help senior church leaders encounter cutting edge science, we took a group of Bishops into the lab and introduced them to these child sized robots. Initially nervous and having spent a morning trying to define the theological differences between the human and non-human, laughter filled the air as the Bishops talked with the robots and their programmers. In the playfulness, science and theology had a fruitful exchange about what it means to be human. Watching this encounter I couldn’t help thinking of the way that God is poetically described in the book of Job as a Creator who delights in and has fun with the diversity of his creation. It seems to me that we need to guard a place for such playfulness whether in an exam dominated view of education or both in the fear of and the crucial economic role of robotics and AI. There are serious questions about the future but human beings in the image of God are given the capacity for innovation and amusement - we should all take time to play.