Artificial Intelligence, or AI, may bring to mind Ex Machina, The Matrix and the Terminator movies. But in reality, AI and robotics are reshaping our lives, prompting ethical, legal and societal debates. Today AI is seen all around us, from Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and self-driving cars powered by Google, Lyft and Ford. Here are 7 powerful AI trends we can expect in 2017. Apple Home on iPhone and Google Home, an extension of Amazon Echo, automated home devices resulting in a connected ecosystem.

In 2011, IBM sent its supercomputer Watson onto the popular American TV quiz show Jeopardy where it succeeded in matching wits with and beating two of the TV show's most successful players. That was over five years ago, but if you ask members of the public to describe IBM Watson, those in the know will say that it's a huge great black mainframe computer that's incredibly smart. Yet according to IBM, that's where you'd be wrong – the computing giant is adamant that the future of artificial intelligence will not be one big scary digital brain, and technology is definitely not going to kill us off one day. "When IBM Watson first came out, we used to think about it as a giant brain in a jar, but it's not that," John Cohn, an IBM Fellow in the IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT) division tells IBTimes UK while showing us around IBM's new global IoT headquarters in Munich, Germany. "It's a bunch of tools that you can use to compose systems that interact naturally with humans, learns from their situation, adapting and then applying that knowledge. It's not an easy philosophy to apply, but it can bring benefits to so many different industries."

One question raised by the introduction of AI legal platforms is how well they do their jobs compared to a flesh-and-blood lawyer, who has years of experience under her belt. Will the machine miss things that a good lawyer with a lot of experience would otherwise catch? "That's an argument that been refuted quite a bit," said Jay Leib, founder and managing member of NexLP. Leib's Chicago-based company offers eDiscovery, an AI platform that searches documents for information relevant to lawsuits and other litigation. Sure," Leib said of AI legal tools. "But since 1985, we've known that human beings are not very good at keyword searches," he said. "There's this fallacy that human beings looking at documents is the gold standard.

Do conservatives and liberals speak different languages? Given the heated nature of political debate these days, it certainly seems like it. But how do you find common ground when people from different sides of the aisle are trying to communicate? This question was one of the motivations behind Partisan Thesaurus, a project that enables you to type any word and see the other words with which liberals and conservatives mostly commonly associate it. Type a politically charged word like "immigrant," and see that liberals associate it with "undocumented," "innocent," and "unarmed," while conservatives associate it with "alien," "outcast," and "obscure."

When you hear "artificial intelligence" or "machine learning," what comes to mind? A complicated technology that demands deep domain experience or a degree to use? This was once the way technology worked; only a select few had access. But innovation has a funny way of changing things. What might seem out of reach today can become widely accessible tomorrow – just look at the GPS system, or drones. Machine learning has made it so that marketing automation platforms can be predictive – able to learn, think, and act without explicit instructions.

Adobe's latest experiment isn't the first program to use AI to turn photos into stylized paintings, but the company says Artistic Eye operates on a larger scale. Adobe's latest experiment in artificial intelligence puts the style of museum-famous artists in the hands of a webcam -- and a few kids. Today, the imaging software giant shared a peek at Artistic Eye, an experimental AI-powered style-transfer technology. Rather than put the new tech into the hands of the typical Adobe mobile app user or even Photoshop users, Adobe introduced Artistic Eye during a kids' party at the de Young Museum in California earlier this year. The fundraiser, for the de Youngsters group that aims to make the museum more family friendly, featured a photo booth where families could take selfies and then use the style-transfer technology to turn themselves into the style of one of the works on display at de Young.

Even though it was intended as a bravura demonstration of the business potential of artificial intelligence (AI), Salesforce today perfectly captured the technology's current limitations with the aid of a Coca-Cola cooler cabinet. The demonstration was part of the vendor's customer kick-off event for its new financial year -- the first in a series that will set the tone for Salesforce's marketing from now until its annual Dreamforce conference in November. The event was an intimate affair, though watched remotely by a huge online audience, held in a conference room on the 23rd floor of Salesforce's temporary headquarters. Visible from the wall-to-ceiling windows was the towering skeleton across the road of San Francisco's tallest building, destined on completion to become the cloud giant's new corporate home. Co-founders CEO Marc Benioff and CTO Parker Harris blew out candles on a birthday cake to mark the eighteenth anniversary tomorrow of the now $8.4 billion revenue company's founding.

The Goodyear Eagle 360 Urban is a 360-degree tyre concept designed for autonomous cars that has artificial intelligence. The ball-shaped tyre evolves a design first demonstrated at last year's Geneva motor show (see video below), but the 2017 version adds an internal computer, which can learn over time to contribute information to the car's digital'nervous system'. Like last year's Eagle 360, the Urban concept is held beneath a car using magnetic levitation – meaning there is no physical join. It also features sensors that can analyse road conditions, but the addition of artificial intelligence means the tyre can help the car make informed decisions about its route or movements. The tyre's outer layer has a special morphing tread that can harden or soften to increase or reduce flexibility, to suit different road conditions.

WASHINGTON, DC (March 8, 2017)--Interventional radiologists at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) are using technology found in self-driving cars to power a machine learning application that helps guide patients' interventional radiology care, according to research presented today at the Society of Interventional Radiology's 2017 Annual Scientific Meeting. The researchers used cutting-edge artificial intelligence to create a "chatbot" interventional radiologist that can automatically communicate with referring clinicians and quickly provide evidence-based answers to frequently asked questions. This allows the referring physician to provide real-time information to the patient about the next phase of treatment, or basic information about an interventional radiology treatment. "We theorized that artificial intelligence could be used in a low-cost, automated way in interventional radiology as a way to improve patient care," said Edward W. Lee, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of radiology at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine and one of the authors of the study. "Because artificial intelligence has already begun transforming many industries, it has great potential to also transform health care."

If the popular media are to be believed, artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to steal your job and threaten life as we know it. If we do not prepare now, we may face a future where AI runs free and dominates humans in society. The AI revolution is indeed underway. To ensure you are prepared to make it through the times ahead, we've created a handy survival guide for you. The first step in every conflict is knowing your target.