As the tug of war between humans and machines escalates, we've become witnesses on nearly a daily basis to events that suggest there won't be an ultimate winner or loser in this existential battle for survival and supremacy. Just take two little human mistakes that recently received worldwide attention because of the power of today's technology to magnify their impacts on a global scale. The first was the mistake made by a senior partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, who was assigned to hand an envelope to an actor tasked to announce the best picture of the year. This is a task that has been performed flawlessly for decades. It is a job that has been practiced so often that a structured protocol has been established to ensure that it is handled seamlessly.

The field of AI has seen a significant increase in interest in the past couple of years, including an upswing in the number of large enterprises running their own experiments with AI systems. The vast majority of AI projects in enterprises is still at the experimentation stage where about half of large enterprises are experimenting with "smart computing" projects. These organizations are examining problems and deciding whether AI can be applied to find solutions. These efforts are still in the early stages. But one area that appears to be taking off is how enterprises are now seriously looking at "accelerated analytics" and "AI driven analytics" as a solution to the data deluge many companies are seeing.

Digital transformation is clearly essential to companies' future success, as businesses that manage the digital transformation process well are already seeing higher growth, profit, and employee engagement rates than their peers, according to the Leaders 2020 Research Brief. Digital transformation, however, is not merely about the implementation of new technology but, just as important, about the usage of this technology. As we go about our private lives, we are increasingly relying on the Internet of Things (IoT) to connect us to myriad applications, services, service providers, and vendors. We are connected to the IoT through everything from our smartphones, wearable fitness devices, and personal virtual assistants, to connected cars, connected homes, GPS locators, and a wide variety of sensors. All of this happens in an increasingly seamless fashion, and our usage of these technologies is affecting virtually every aspect of our daily routines and tasks. From a corporate perspective, the massive amounts of data generated – through these devices and the billions of enterprise devices and sensors that are already connected (15 billion devices in 2015 based on an Intel infographic) – is creating the potential for an entirely new level of integration and usage of data into our business decisions.

Some of the world's biggest leaders in science and technology including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Bill Gates, have expressed their concerns about the rapid progression and evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Elon Musk in a CNBC interview stated, "I think that the biggest risk is not that the AI will develop a will of its own… but rather that it will follow the will of people that establish its utility function." Movies like The Terminator, The Matrix, Ex Machina, 2001: A Space Odyssey amongst others, all point to the notion that artificial intelligence will evolve past human intelligence to the point that we will no longer be able to control our own creations. There is an ingrained narrative that AI will somehow reach a level of self-awareness and inevitably then attempt to destroy or replace the human race. And while some of these ideas may seem excessive, or merely the product of media and film exaggeration of AI leading to Terminator-like robots hunting humans like deer, there is enough concern amongst thought leaders such as those mentioned above, to make these concerns highly credible even if there is no certainty about them ever playing out.

Philip Hammond says he wants the UK to become a "world leader" in 5G, the next-generation mobile technology that proponents say is the key to an internet-connected world of driverless cars, smart home appliances, delivery drones and lightning-fast video on the go. The government, which has published a 70-page tome on its future 5G strategy, said in the budget it would invest up to £16m to run trials and support the technology's development, to make sure the UK is at the crest of the "next wave of mobile technology services". However, 5G, which is set to be rolled out in the UK next decade, also has its critics. They argue consumers don't need the superfast speeds the upgrade from current 4G technology promises, and many in the industry believe that logistical issues mean that 5G may not be properly rolled out in the UK for decades. In the meantime, there are still basic infrastructure issues – including rural areas with little or no broadband coverage at all – that need sorting out.

Reality and the digital world are coming together. Cheap sensors, combined with the Internet of Things and big data processing, allow a company to monitor equipment, product, environment, and more. The end result is instant reaction at the point of interaction. This is a radical change in how business operates, according to Suresh Acharya (pictured), head of JDA Labs at JDA Software Group Inc. "What is changing dramatically is the fact all of this is being digitized," said Acharya. He spoke to John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's mobile live-streaming studio, at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, TX. (*Disclosure below).

Another day, another fun internet thing that uses neural networks for facial manipulation. This time it's DeepWarp, a demo created by Yaroslav Ganin, Daniil Kononenko, Diana Sungatullina, and Victor Lempitsky, that uses deep architecture to move human eyeballs in a still image. First spotted by Prosthetic Knowledge, DeepWarp is focused on realistic "gaze manipulation." The authors of the demo acknowledge that similar projects already exist (like the smile-manipulator FaceApp), but without such a singular, detailed focus. The authors note that their findings in this study could be applied to solve real-world issues of eye movement, like for "gaze correction in video conferencing."

Unless you've been hiding out in a doomsday bunker you'll have heard the news that the robots are coming for your job. They are already delivering takeaways in Washington, DC, flipping burgers in California, doing data entry in accounting firms worldwide, writing articles for the Associated Press, appealing parking tickets, correcting errors on Wikipedia, managing Amazon's warehouses, creating ads for Coca-Cola and helping in complex surgery. Soon "there will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better", according to the gloomy prediction of Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive and notorious worrier about the robot apocalypse. Lest you think your role is safe, a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute brings the cheery news that by 2055 robots will be doing more than half of what qualifies as work in today's world. McKinsey has provided a search tool where you can check how vulnerable your occupation is to partial or complete automation, but I'll save you the trouble: unless your job involves owning the corporation that builds the robots it's probably deemed at risk.

When it comes to the public cloud, launching VMs, provisioning storage, and configuring networks is no more cutting edge. The core building blocks of IaaS have gone past the evolution phase to become stable. With enterprises adopting public cloud at a rapid pace, we cannot expect further disruption to the cloud infrastructure services. Mainstream providers will only add newer VM type, additional regions and zones, and optimized storage and network services. With IaaS hitting a plateau, what will take public cloud to the next level?

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.