Unexpected convergent consequences…this is what happens when eight different exponential technologies all explode onto the scene at once. This post (the second of seven) is a look at artificial intelligence. Future posts will look at other tech areas. An expert might be reasonably good at predicting the growth of a single exponential technology (e.g., the Internet of Things), but try to predict the future when A.I., robotics, VR, synthetic biology and computation are all doubling, morphing and recombining. You have a very exciting (read: unpredictable) future. This year at my Abundance 360 Summit I decided to explore this concept in sessions I called "Convergence Catalyzers." For each technology, I brought in an industry expert to identify their Top 5 Recent Breakthroughs (2012-2015) and their Top 5 Anticipated Breakthroughs (2016-2018). Then, we explored the patterns that emerged. At A360 this year, my expert on AI was Stephen Gold, the CMO and VP of Business Development and Partner Programs at IBM Watson.

Driving a car in the middle of the desert at night without any headlights is easy for any driver. The trip becomes a little more challenging if there are obstacles the driver has to avoid, and harder still if there's a road to navigate. At this point, most humans (those without immediate access to a high-quality night vision system) might start to have some trouble. Robots, being much better at this whole driving thing than humans are, don't really care whether there's daylight or street lights, as some recent testing from Ford demonstrates. Google, for the record, has been testing its autonomous cars on public roads in California after dark for a while now. Or at least, Google has been testing at night, which is not quite the same thing.

The computing industry progresses in two mostly independent cycles: financial and product cycles. There has been a lot of handwringing lately about where we are in the financial cycle. Financial markets get a lot of attention. They tend to fluctuate unpredictably and sometimes wildly. The product cycle by comparison gets relatively little attention, even though it is what actually drives the computing industry forward.

If you close your eyes and imagine a brick wall, you can probably come up with a pretty good mental image. After seeing many such walls, your brain knows what one should look like. A startup in the U.K. is using machine learning to enable computers and smartphones to model visual information in a similar way. A computer could use these visual models for various tasks, from improving video streaming to automatically generating elements of a realistic virtual world. Magic Pony Technology, created by graduates of Imperial College London with expertise in statistics, computer vision, and neuroscience, trains large neural networks to process visual information.

Secretive electric car company Faraday Future hopes to have its first vehicles rolling off the assembly line in 2018. The announcement was made as officials marked the start of construction on a planned 1 billion Las Vegas-area production plant, not far from rival Tesla's Gigafactory. While it's clear the company plans to create an electric car, a prototype has yet to be unveiled and there are no specifics yet on what kinds of cars it might manufacture. The company, backed by Chinese entrepreneur Jia Yueting, currently has about 700 employees in the U.S. It unveiled a concept car in January, but hasn't put a vehicle on the market. Faraday Future puts the size of the Apex Industrial Park facility at 3 million square feet, or nearly the size of the sprawling Las Vegas Convention Center close to the Las Vegas Strip.

It is the luxury speedboat that could leave you shaken, but not stirred. Luxury car maker Aston Martin, the supplier of James Bond's cars, has revealed the design for its first foray onto water. The firm hopes to produce a series of powerboats, which is boasts will be as luxurious and hi-tech as its cars. The AM37 yacht will enter production later this year, and will be launched in Monaco. There will be two captains chairs and a wrap-around bench set to accommodate 8 of your friends to take along for the journey.

There are companies out there working fast and furious to develop artificial intelligence in computers and what will that mean for our human society? Will developers develop themselves out of a job? Can computer artificial intelligence evoke human emotion and move people to buy products and services? If so, I am out of a job. In all seriousness, it will be interesting to see the applications and if it will be used to assist the human race, or to replace it.

The last time Microsoft released a "bot" onto the internet, it quickly became a Donald Trump-supporting, Nazi-sympathising, conspiracy theory-believing racist . It has unveiled a website called CaptionBo t, which uses clever algorithms to recognise images. Users are asked to give a star rating to reflect its accuracy, letting the bot learn from its mistakes and improve its skills. "I can understand the content of any image and I'll try to describe it as well as any human," the bot said. If you look at the tweets above, you'll see what happened to Tay, Microsoft's last creation. It was supposed to be a "chill" machine, but ended up getting tricked into spouting racist rhetoric, praising Hitler and calling for Mexico to build a wall to keep migrants out of the US.

Deadline for Call for Speakers is April 30, 2016. You will be notified of the status of your speaker submission by May 15, 2016. C-Level and senior business leaders focused on artificial intelligence business and technology issues are invited to submit an application to speak at AI World Conference & Expo 2016. This exclusive event will focus on key business trends, technologies and solutions that can help enterprise business and technology executives learn from the latest strategies and techniques to gain competitive advantage. If you are interested in speaking, participating in the program development activities or submitting a presentation, please complete the form below.

Chinese internet giant Alibaba has built artificial intelligence that it hopes will be able to correctly predict the outcome of reality TV talent show I'm a Singer. According to Tech in Asia, Alibaba's technology uses performance information such as "voice pitch and energy," and maps that against factors such as song choice and real-time audience response. The results will be shown online, pitching the technology, named'Ai', against the judges as the show is aired. The experiment is being held as a "proof-of-concept" for the technology, with Alibaba suggesting that it'll be used for purposes closer to its core business of online retail in the future. It's not the only internet company to be testing new technology on reality TV shows in Asia.