During the 1830s, England entered into the Industrial Revolution's era of big data. Its government began producing vast troves of statistical information about everything from the cost of "pease and beans" to the export of hats. Processing all that information was time-consuming. Its civil service had to employ an army of clerks to read handwritten census records from every single parish, tabulate the data on large sheets of paper, make tick marks, count the ticks, fold the pages over, and convert everything into new tables, over and over again for every statistic the government wanted to know. They were known as "computers." Many suffered nervous breakdowns from all the ticking and counting.

Paul Lee, from Deloitte, said a number of "invisible innovations", such as 5G connections, facial recognition and improved artificial intelligence, would drive sales.

If there's one thing we can learn from the Terminator franchise, it's that too much technological advancement is not something we should be a hundred percent on board with. What's worse is that with the advancement we're getting with the AI technology, the creation of Skynet can actually be not that far ahead into the future. We're slowly getting there, and that should terrify you. Not sold on the idea yet? In order to start the ball rolling, here are some terrifying facts about Artificial Intelligence right now.

Nineteenth-century big data: In 1891, Great Britain produced 53 pounds of meat per inhabitant.

Professor Cave cited the breakthrough of quantum computing as a major step in AI development, providing machines with a way to "become clever than we are". Another leading researcher, Anders Samberg, who works at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, warned that a major danger was that scientists may not realise their mistake in AI creation until it is too late. Earlier in the AI special of the Today programme, a researcher told the BBC that AI development meant that soon we would gain "ultimate liberation from our evolutionary shackles".

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been shaking up many areas of business, from cybersecurity to market analytics, bots and self-driving cars. But when it comes to core corporate functions, especially those where the risks of making bad decisions are substantial, the use of artificial intelligence is still in its early stages. Take, for example, AmerisourceBergen, a drug wholesale company based in Conshohocken, Penn. The company has 19,000 employees in 47 countries, and gross revenues of $147 billion a year, good for 11th on the Fortune 500. Alexander Kugler, the company's VP of pricing, is well aware of the potential of artificial intelligence to help the company make better decisions when it sets prices for its products. Set prices too high, and customers will go elsewhere. Set prices too low, and the company will lose money.

A shortage of charging points and strain on energy supplies are now the main stumbling blocks to the rise of driverless electric cars, according to the UK boss of insurer Axa. Amanda Blanc said a lack of rapid charging bays and pressure on the National Grid have overtaken questions about accident liability as the biggest barriers to autonomous vehicles entering the transport mainstream. Blanc, a Tesla driver, said personal experience pointed to problems lying ahead for driverless electric vehicles. There are around 125,000 plug-in electric cars in the UK and 14,000 chargers - 2,620 of them being rapid chargers that can give a car an 80% charge in 30 minutes. Shell has just opened its first charging points for electric vehicles at 10 filling stations, mostly in London and the south-east.

It's been an amazing year for the Neuromation team, starting with the token sale in the first quarter of 2017, going through to lab launches, model development and active sales and marketing campaigns…we are now finishing the pre-sale with amazing results of more than 35 million NeuroTokens sold to the AI community! Here is what we've achieved so far. Most recently, we joined forces with Giga-Watt, the world's first full-service mining solution provider. Led by one of the world's most recognisable bitcoin miners, Dave Carlson, Giga-Watt provides infrastructure that supports the facilities that host and operate equipment. We are also proud to have OSA Hybrid among our partners that uses AI to provide shelf availability optimization for retailers, and Hacken, a tokenized bug-bounty and cybersecurity system focused on blockchain applications. We believe collaboration is key to building the blockchain ecosystem that serves practical purposes while protecting user privacy and data security.

If ever there was an industry ripe for disruption it is surely the legal profession. Unlike many other sectors, however, it has tended to be a little reticent about embracing technology to innovate. After all, the traditional way of doing business for legal firms has been extremely profitable. The model typically involves a bunch of low-paid minions doing grunt work while a few partners earn eye-wateringly high sums. Moreover, many legal professionals look upon technology with fear and who could blame them when a forecast from Deloitte published last year predicted that more than 100,000 jobs in the sector could be automated within the next 20 years.

If you're worried about the future and where technology might lead us, 2017 didn't help. The warnings kept rolling in about potential job losses from automation and machine learning. More than 375 million of us will need to completely change occupations to avoid being replaced by robots, a recent report estimated. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence keeps getting smarter: The world got its first robot citizen, another robot learned to do backflips, and DeepMind's AI has mastered chess. It doesn't need to be so frightening, says Tim O'Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O'Reilly Media.