Across sectors, startups are seeking out talent with AI expertise to analyse consumer data and offer personalised services to users. Meanwhile, global giants such as Apple have taken notice of Indian companies that help clients with data processing and image and voice recognition, and investors, too, are backing Indian AI startups. Here's how some of India's unicorns--companies valued at more than $1 billion--are putting these technologies to use. From being an e-wallet to selling movie or flight tickets, Paytm now delivers a diverse range of services and machine learning helps bring order to that chaos. "You could Google and try to look for something. But a better world would be when Google could on its own figure out Charu is looking for'x' at this time. That's exactly what we're doing at Paytm," the company's chief technology officer, Charumitra Pujari, who came to Paytm after working with the e-retail giant Amazon for nearly two years, said.

Or is it a remotely operated quadrotor conducting surveillance or preparing to drop a deadly payload? Human observers won't have to guess--or keep their eyes glued to computer monitors--now that there's superhuman artificial intelligence capable of distinguishing drones from those other flying objects. Automated watchfulness, thanks to machine learning, has given police and other agencies tasked with maintaining security an important countermeasure to help them keep pace with swarms of new drones taking to the skies. The security challenge has only grown over the past few years: Millions of people have bought consumer drones and sometimes flown them into off limits areas where they pose a hazard to crowds on the ground or larger aircraft in the sky. Off-the-shelf drones have also become affordable and dangerous weapons for the Islamic State and other militant groups in war-torn regions such as Iraq and Syria.

Here's a glimpse of what the future will look like. This week, Scientific American published its annual report on emerging technologies. The list is a compilation of what the publication calls "disruptive solutions" that are "poised to change the world." To qualify, a particular technology must be attracting funding or showing signs of an imminent breakthrough, but must not have reached widespread adoption yet. Here are a few of the cutting-edge technologies that made the list--and the companies that are already making strides with them.

For years, the X Prize Foundation has funded competitions that ask participants to make sci-fi a reality: a device to extract water from thin air, like Star Trek's replicator; a tool to instantly diagnose disease, like the Star Trek tricorder; a crime alert network, inspired by Minority Report. But for its latest competition, Seat14C, the organization is putting the fiction first--by asking writers to envision what humanity will need in the future. Starting today, 22 new science fiction stories go live on the Seat14C website, courtesy of genre luminaries like Margaret Atwood and Charlie Jane Anders. Each story details the future from the perspective of a different passengers on a plane that traveled through a wormhole 20 years into the future. Other writers will then compete to tell the story of the passenger in seat 14C.

Too often the answer to this question resembles the plot of a sci-fi thriller. People worry that developments in A.I. will bring about the "singularity" -- that point in history when A.I. surpasses human intelligence, leading to an unimaginable revolution in human affairs. Or they wonder whether instead of our controlling artificial intelligence, it will control us, turning us, in effect, into cyborgs. These are interesting issues to contemplate, but they are not pressing. They concern situations that may not arise for hundreds of years, if ever.

After all, Volvo has long asserted that the best attributes of its cars reveal themselves only in a crash. But this was an autonomous Volvo, part of a small test fleet Uber operated in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Arizona. The latter had welcomed Uber with open pro-business arms after the company and the California DMV got into a semantics spat, since resolved, over a $150 permit. The Cal DMV had revoked the registrations for Uber's 16 test vehicles, and if the bureaucrats were motivated by the fear of a couple tons of undercooked technology circulating among the driving public, those fears seem to have been vindicated by the photos of the capsized Volvo. It doesn't matter that, by all accounts, it wasn't the fault of the Volvo's computer that a driver turned suddenly in front of the oncoming robo-car, giving neither it nor the human minder aboard time to avoid the impact.

You might think putting a helipad on Trump Tower would give the president's Manhattan residence an added veneer of affluence. After all, nothing conveys wealth and power quite like arriving at your own skyscraper aboard Marine One, right? Not according to Penny, an artificial intelligence that uses satellite imagery to predict income levels in the Big Apple and how they change as you tinker with the urban landscape. When I called up the president's Manhattan residence via Penny's clean, intuitive interface, it saw nothing but wealth. "PENNY is 100% confident that this is a HIGH median income area," it reported.

Tong Zhang and Andrew Ng spoke at The Wall Street Journal's D.Live Asia conference. Artificial intelligence may be one of the technology world's current obsessions, but many people find it scary, envisioning robots taking over the world.

Research from PwC has shown that the majority of the UK's economic gains over the period to 2030 will come from increasing consumer demand. AI will drive this, with a greater choice of products, increased personalisation of those products and making them more affordable over time. Labour productivity improvements will also drive GDP gains, but to a lesser extent. Jonathan Gillham, economist at PwC, said "Much of the focus on AI to date has been on the impact that increased automation of tasks will have on jobs. While we expect that the nature of jobs will change and that some will be susceptible to automation, our research shows that the boost to UK GDP that AI-driven products and services will bring will also generate significant offsetting job gains, as well as boosting average real wage levels." See also: How AI can transform I.T. and keep businesses at the summit "AI will make everyday products better, more personalised and cheaper over the longer term, which we predict will fuel increased demand.