Some 250 billion billion (250 x1018) transistors were produced in 2014. That means that every second of that year, on average, eight trillion transistors were produced - about 25 times the number of stars in the Milky Way (this statistic is from 2014, so according to Moore's Law production should now have doubled). The enormous surge in computing power which we are witnessing heralds some other lapel-grabbing metrics: 58% of job activities can be automated; 47% of jobs will be lost to cognitive machines in the next ten years. Taking advantage of this exponential is a wave of machine learning, deep learning and AI specialists. One such company is Seldon, a talented start-up selected to join the Barclays Accelerator powered by Techstars.

People love to anthropomorphize machines. You might name your car and sweet-talk it all the way to the gas station when the fuel light goes on, but you probably won't confuse it for a person. Things get trickier as machines get smarter, so it's important to remember that artificial intelligence is not human intelligence; for AI to live up to its promise we need to understand how it thinks like us, and how it doesn't. Take last week's first-ever victory of a computer over a top-level player in the ancient game of Go. "AlphaGo is clearly a form of highly tuned intelligence," says David Krakauer, president of the Santa Fe Institute, about the program that defeated grandmaster Lee Se-dol, 4-1, in a five-game series. Yet the software approaches the game differently than its human opponents.

I am a practicing Expert Witness, with report, deposition, and court testimony experience. And I've used that system to automate forensic analysis in the course of my Expert Witness work.An expert system has two main objectives, after capturing a body of expertise in the form of rules: o Provide that expertise in the absence of the expert. However, nothing prevents the creation of expert system rules that do embody such learning behavior, and in fact I often create such rules in the course of my work. Once that happens, I do regard it as AI.A key feature of applying expert systems to legal work is the leverage they provide. If a case involves a large body of code, data, or text, and a judge (who often doesn't understand the technical implications of discovery in such a case) mandates a short deadline for discovery completion, automation is the only way to achieve the needed results. And it's expert systems such as mine that provide that automation.

Even as I begin the long process of writing about all of the games I saw and the people I spoke to at GDC, I've found a new distraction. The San Andreas Streaming Deer Cam is a live feed of a modded GTA V [official site] that "creates and follows a deer wandering through the fictional state of San Andreas". The deer "is autonomous and will wander and respond to it's surroundings, interacting with the existing GTA V artifical intelligence". Over the weekend, the deer wandered through a gunfight between two gangs, caused a traffic jam during rush hour and evaded the police. This is the best version of GTA V.

Using artificial intelligence (AI) in your business may not be something that is on your agenda, but the chances are you may have already begun to use AI without even knowing it. The Airbnb application for instances uses Aerosolve to deliver its dynamic pricing feature. Amazon's Machine Learning – part of its AWS cloud services – allows businesses to analyse massive datasets to reveal patterns and also train its algorithm. And Google's Translate API uses machine learning to deliver much more accurate translations, as it assesses how words relate to each other. In a report into the possible impact of machine learning, Simon Raik-Allen, MYOB's Chief Technology Officer, said: "As machines get smarter, there will be a time when someone creates a machine that can learn. We are not there yet, but a lot of progress is being made."

IBM has updated its artificial intelligence (AI) product, IBM Watson, giving it the ability to recognise images. Watson, which relies on cognitive learning to help it process the world in a human-like manner, can now'guess' what's happening in images fed to it via URLs. IBM has created a'Visual Recognition Demo' to showcase Watson's latest trick, which allows users to feed Watson an image before it tells you what it believes it sees. For example, supplying Watson with the image of a tiger throws up the result 77 per cent tiger, 26 per cent wild cat and 63 per cent cat. As well as identifying objects, people or animals in photos, Watson is also fairly adept at guessing what's going on in the background of images such as sunsets and other outdoor scenes.

For the average player, trying to beat the computer at chess (even when you're just playing on'easy' on your laptop) is a difficult task. But as humans, we take solace in the fact that chess Grand Masters are still able to win against machines. Despite chess engines being capable of searching through 200 million possible moves going against a human player who can only think of maybe five moves per second, the masters still manage to play at the same level as the advanced tech. By evaluating chess moves and having the ability to narrow down the most advantageous avenues of search, thus whittling down the options to just a few, notable possibilities. Computers are unable to this as efficiently as humans, which is why humans still have the upper hand (or at least a somewhat level playing field) when playing against machines.

Some of the most promising work is already taking place in healthcare, where cognitive computing is identifying insights that can be used by doctors in their fight against deadly and chronic diseases. Cancer centers in New York, North Carolina, India and Thailand are using these systems to help their doctors in their efforts to provide personalized, evidence-based cancer care tailored to each patient's unique needs. Hospitals in Colorado are helping patients with heart disease adopt--and stick with--heart–healthy behaviors, aiming to help prevent future costly hospital stays. And a new study in California is using technology to determine whether it is possible to predict veterans at risk for long-term PTSD and then customize treatment recommendations to help address the devastating condition.

The technology industry has a problem with diversity. True to form, it thinks the solution is technological. Founders of the Future is a new venture that hopes to uncover the Mark Zuckerbergs of the future, using algorithms. "An AI doesn't know anything about your background - which school or university you went to," Tom Bowles told me. Mr Bowles, a machine learning expert, developed the software, which models the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs like Niklas Zennstrom, who set up Skype, and Natalie Massenet, who started Net-a-Porter.

Robots are very fascinating entities, and they have always been one of the foremost subjects of science fiction. The very name robot originated in science fiction writing, although one could argue that the notion of autonomous mechanical artifacts has a very long tradition that predates science fiction. The golden age of robots in science fiction was probably a few decades ago. Unfortunately as the developments in robotics have lagged well behind of what the sci-fi writers had made us to expect, the interest in robots has somewhat cooled off. However, the first low-scale commercial robots are finally making their mark, and the robotic parts are well within the reach of most casual hobbyists and enthusiasts.