Artificial intelligence (AI) is now a reality, and want it or not, it soon will be part of our daily lives. In a recent study, Bank of America Merrill Lynch predicted that the artificial intelligence market will blossom to 153 billion over the next five years: 83 billion for robots and 70 billion for artificial intelligence-based systems. Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes that virtual robots powered by artificial intelligence are bound to transform the way companies interact with their customers. In a world where disruption has become the norm, super-intelligent machines have the potential to revolutionize businesses while benefiting users and society in general. But as these smart personal assistants blend into our environment, many questions arise.

It was the great hockey player Wayne Gretzky that once said, "A good hockey player skates to where the puck is. A great hockey player skates to where the puck is going to be." When it comes to business there are a lot of great minds making predictions about the future. It is no surprise that technology is at the forefront of these predictions, but now the focus has shifted to'what type of technology?' Do some research and you'll discover that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at the top of the list, and the smartest minds on the planet are saying it is the next big thing. In fact, research firm Markets and Markets estimates that the AI market will grow to 5.05 billion by 2020.

Artificial intelligence, and technology in general, will have a crucial role to play in society's progress, that is the view of the UK and American governments anyway. This Thursday President Obama announced at the first White House Frontier Conference that more than 300 million in funding, through partnerships, will be released for tech innovations that will improve healthcare, develop smart cities and enhance America's space ambition. "We may be in a slightly different period now, simply because of the pervasive applicability of AI and other technologies," said President Obama in a video shown at the start of the conference. President Obama believes AI, in particular, will be able to help solve the biggest crises that face the world, such as disease, famine, climate change and economic inequality. Others, like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, suggest AI's rise will be the biggest threat to the survival of the human race.

Recently we have seen a slew of popular films that deal with artificial intelligence – most notably The Imitation Game, Chappie, Ex Machina, and Her. However, despite over five decades of research into artificial intelligence, there remain many tasks that humans find simple which computers cannot do. Given the slow progress of AI, for many the prospect of computers with human-level intelligence seems further away today than it did when Isaac Asimov's classic I, Robot was published in 1950. The fact is, however, that today neuromorphic chips offer a plausible path to realizing human-level artificial intelligence within the next few decades. Starting in the early 2000's there was a realization that neural network models – based on how the human brain works – could solve many tasks that could not be solved by other methods.

Text messaging has become a mainstream form of communication. Now, customer service industry is focusing on the chatbots – the next big thing for information management and customer service. Chatbot is a program simulating a real conversation that you interact with via a chat interface. The application of bots can be really wide, varying from functional to fun, and it can be implemented in any major chat product like Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Slack, text messages, etc. Chatbots have the ability to interpret human speech or writer inquiries and decide which information is being sought. Sometimes you might not realize it, but when it comes to buying tickets, hailing Uber, or ordering tacos, chances are there's a chatbot living in your messaging app.

It might seem like an idea out of science fiction, but the possibility of using potentially any material as a computer could soon become a reality. These alternative materials could be even better for developing artificial intelligence than existing computers. Some believe such AI could eventually have human-like intelligence and reasoning. Experts Mark Douthwaite, a PhD Candidate in High Integrity Systems Engineering, and Matt Dale, a PhD Student in Non-Standard Computation, both from the University of York, explain how this works in an article for The Conversation. It might seem like an idea out of science fiction, b ut the possibility of using potentially any materia l as a computer could soon become a reality.

Chatbots powered by AI are all the rage nowadays. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, all are developing chatbots that can not only decipher speech, but also understand the meaning behind those words. Chinese search giant Baidu wants to take that all one step further. The company just unveiled Melody, an AI-powered chatbot tailored for the medical field. The bot is able to chat with patients, getting them to reveal symptoms, and then transmits that data to doctors, along with a partial analysis.

Gartner predicts that by 2018, 20 percent of business content will be authored by machines. This figure is set to continue to rise as chatbots become increasingly useful and the users increasingly accepting. The main attention on chatbots up until now has been on how they can answer and respond to incoming requests, be they for customer service, entertainment, or other uses. But this is just half of the story. There is a huge benefit in using chatbots to initiate or continue customer engagement, not just react to it.

These systems don't just require more information than humans to understand concepts or recognize features, they require hundreds of thousands times more, says Neil Lawrence, a professor of machine learning at the University of Sheffield and part of Amazon's AI team. Once they've been trained, they can be incredibly efficient at tasks like recognizing cats or playing Atari games, says Google DeepMind research scientist Raia Hadsell. A solution to this might be something called progressive neural networks -- this means connecting separate deep learning systems together so that they can pass on certain bits of information. One way of doing this is revisiting an old, unfashionable strand of artificial intelligence known as symbolic AI or Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI), says Murray Shanahan, a professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London (and also the scientific advisor on Ex Machina).

Back in 1970, the social activist Irina Dunn scribbled a slogan on the back of a toilet cubicle door at the University of Sydney. It said: "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." The phrase went viral and eventually became a famous refrain for the growing feminist movement of the time. The phrase is also an example of sarcasm. The humor comes from the fact that a fish doesn't need a bicycle.