内容摘要：The trio went through a process that lasted for months and included several rounds of auditions and workshops.

The trio went through a process that lasted for months and included several rounds of auditions and workshops.

The militants were - and still are - fighting for the independence of Cameroon's two anglophone regions in what is a predominantly francophone country. A near-decade-long conflict that has led to thousands of deaths and stunted life in the area.When he was abducted four years ago, Dora struggled to reach Johnson. When she eventually heard from separatist militants, they asked for a ransom of over $55,000 (£41,500) to be paid within 24 hours in order to secure his release. Dora then received another call from one of Johnson's relatives.

"He said… that I should take care of the children. That my husband is no more. I didn't even know what to do. Tuesday he was travelling, and he was kidnapped. Friday he was killed," says Dora.The separatists responsible had not just murdered but decapitated Johnson, and left his body on the road.The roots of the separatist struggle lie in long-standing grievances that stretch back to full independence in 1961, and the formation of a single Cameroonian state in 1972 from former British and French territories.

Since then the English-speaking minority have felt aggrieved at the perceived erosion of rights by the central government. Johnson was just an innocent by-stander, caught up in an increasingly brutal fight for self-determination and the government's desperate attempts to stamp out the uprising.The current wave of violence began almost a decade ago.

In late 2016, peaceful protests started against what was perceived to be the creeping use of the francophone legal system in the region's courtrooms. The French- and English-speaking parts of Cameroon use different judicial systems.

The protests rapidly spread, and led to a call for the closing of shops and institutions.The idea of machines with their own minds has long been explored in science fiction. Worries about AI stretch back nearly a hundred years to the film Metropolis, in which a robot impersonates a real woman.

A fear of machines becoming conscious and posing a threat to humans is explored in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the HAL 9000 computer attacks astronauts onboard its spaceship. And in the final Mission Impossible film, which has just been released, the world is threatened by a powerful rogue AI, described by one character as a "self-aware, self-learning, truth-eating digital parasite".But quite recently, in the real world there has been a rapid tipping point in thinking on machine consciousness, where credible voices have become concerned that this is no longer the stuff of science fiction.

The sudden shift has been prompted by the success of so-called large language models (LLMs), which can be accessed through apps on our phones such as Gemini and Chat GPT. The ability of the latest generation of LLMs to have plausible, free-flowing conversations has surprised even their designers and some of the leading experts in the field.There is a growing view among some thinkers that as AI becomes even more intelligent, the lights will suddenly turn on inside the machines and they will become conscious.