Machine learning algorithms are worked into a variety of popular products on the market today and used by the biggest technology companies, such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle, and IBM, to name a few. But while machine learning algorithms are fairly routine and practical, there is the primary subject from which it branches: artificial intelligence (AI). After decades of popular films and books, what has been achieved from AI? First, the benefits of AI research have yielded various applications, from Apple's Siri to IBM's prototype diagnostic app, Watson. "AI has attracted more than 17 billion in investments since 2009. Last year alone more than 2 billion was invested in 322 companies with AI-like technology" (Kelly).

A pioneer in Artificial Intelligence, Adam Cheyer has spent most of his life living by what he calls "Verbally Stated Goals" -- that is, continuously striving to do and achieve more each year. As a child, he dreamed of becoming a magician and, in many ways, he did just that: in 2008, as inventor, computer scientist, engineer, and entrepreneur, he co-created the world's first intelligent personal assistant, Siri, with Dag Kittlaus and Tom Gruber. Siri, Inc. was a technology company borne out of SRI International, a nonprofit research unit, to create a highly clever and personable virtual assistant for smartphone consumers. By 2010, the company had been acquired by Apple Inc., and the Siri app was incorporated into Apple's iPhone 4S handsets. Cheyer became Director of Engineering for the iPhone/iOS team at Apple, where he remained for two years before leaving to spend more time with his family and to pursue personal endeavours. Cheyer is also a founding member of Change.org, a social network for positive social change, and is co-founder of Genetic Finance, which applies advanced artificial intelligence to solve problems within a wide range of industries, including financial trading, insurance, computer networking, and electronics design. Newnham: Take me back to your childhood. What first excited you about technology? Adam Cheyer: As a child, I was allowed to watch an hour of TV a week, and in that time, I got my fill of commercials selling me on the latest toys.

I went to school in Cambridge University in England, then went to Stanford to do my master's around 2000. I met up with Sergey Brin around then when Google was a tiny company and he invited me to join Google. So I started working part-time for Google. It was a fantastic time at the company--200 people, one building, and bright, idealistic, change-the-world kind of people. Naturally, when I finished my master's I joined full-time.

Warning bells sounded this week as The Times published "Robots are coming for your job." The opinion piece predicts: "Human workers of all stripes pound the table claiming desperately that they're irreplaceable. Meanwhile, corporations and investors are spending billions toward making all those jobs replaceable." Wait a minute, chorused our letter writers, not so fast. Part of the problem is that robots and machines are terrific workers but lousy customers.

Artificial intelligence may seem like a futuristic concept, but we're already experiencing it in real ways in our lives, whether we know it or not -- in areas including speech recognition, spam filters and even loan processing. And AI is only going to get more sophisticated from here. That was one of the messages from Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Etzioni spoke with us for this week's episode of the GeekWire radio show and podcast. Our conversation comes amid a boom in everyday AI, from self-driving cars to a computer that has mastered the game of Go. Microsoft put its stake in the ground with an AI-driven vision that CEO Satya Nadella calls "Conversation as a Platform," with virtual agents working on our behalf. Etzioni takes a much more optimistic view of AI than some of his peers. "The existential risk is just way overblown," he says. "It's much more likely that an asteroid will strike the Earth and annihilate life as we know it than AI will turn evil. Listen to the show below, download the MP3 here, and continue reading for an edited transcript of this week's show. Todd Bishop: Oren, in your current position, you really have a sense for the state of artificial intelligence. I think a lot of people out there see it in their daily lives in a very primitive form. They're watching Google's DeepMind beat a world champion Go player. The potential of artificial intelligence is there in a rudimentary form. Where are we now today in terms of the state of artificial intelligence, and where do you think we'll go over the next three to five years? Oren Etzioni: I do actually think that people are using it more than they realize. In addition to something like Siri, Google Search algorithm uses AI and machine learning all the time. Speech dictation on our phones whether it's Android or iPhone has gotten tremendously better and that's using deep learning behind the scenes to improve what's called a speech recognition. Loan processing these days is often done in a highly automated fashion using machine learning. As a matter of fact, AI is becoming more invisible and integrated into our lives. Of course, that can be a little bit scary to people. They say, "Wait a minute.

Bart Peintner has been closely involved with important developments in artificial intelligence through its recent resurgence. At SRI, one of the world's hotbeds of AI research, he pursued work that pressed the limits of natural language processing and user-behavior modeling. Now, as CTO and co-founder of startup Loop AI Labs, he is furthering the cause of unsupervised machine intelligence -- also known as deep machine learning -- for applications. It's important because teaching machines to do human's work can be labor intensive. When did you start Loop AI Labs, and what was the underlying goal?

As the tech world pivots on game-changing applications, data scientists rise to the occasion. Such is the case with Holden Karau, principal software engineer of Big Data at IBM and coauthor of Learning Spark. When asked about the current renovations within Spark, Karau said she sees this time as an "opportunity to get rid of dead weight" by streamlining certain processes. For example, she cited getting functional and relative queries to talk to each other within Spark. Two area of expansion include sequencing and machine learning.

China's search engine giant Baidu launched a project to bring scientists and sci-fi writers to collaborate on imaginative research on Friday. The project, named the Verne Institute after French writer Jules Verne, aims to blend wild imagination and solid science to bring more possibilities, Zhang Yaqin, president of Baidu, told Xinhua in an email interview on Friday. Verne famously said "Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real." Baidu chose to launch the project on April Fool's Day for a sense of contrast to underline the reality of it, Liu Chun with the company's marketing department said. Bridging science and sci-fi may be new in China but is a common way of collaboration elsewhere in the world, Zhang said.

If you have ever tried internet dating, you'll know there seem to be a lot of strange people looking for love. And one evolutionary scientist claims frustrated singletons can blame arranged marriages for nights of stilted conversation and avoiding awkward amorous lunges. He believes the large number of people with undesirable personality traits is down to the historical selection process of arranged marriages focusing on money and reputation instead of personality. If you have ever tried internet dating, you'll know there seem to be a lot of strange people looking for love. Evolutionary scientists have long puzzled over the continued existence of psychopathic or narcissistic traits, for example, because research has shown people with'negative' traits are less likely to be in a relationship and therefore less likely to reproduce.

In my new book BOLD, one of the interviews that I'm most excited about is with my good friend Ray Kurzweil. Bill Gates calls Ray, "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence." Ray is also amazing at predicting a lot more beyond just AI. This post looks at his very incredible predictions for the next 20 years. He has received 20 honorary doctorates, has been awarded honors from three U.S. presidents, and has authored 7 books (5 of which have been national bestsellers). He is the principal inventor of many technologies ranging from the first CCD flatbed scanner to the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind. He is also the chancellor and co-founder of Singularity University, and the guy tagged by Larry Page to direct artificial intelligence development at Google. In short, Ray's pretty smart… and his predictions are amazing, mind-boggling, and important reminders that we are living in the most exciting time in human history. But, first let's look back at some of the predictions Ray got right. Then in 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov. He was right, to say the least.