If you think the pace of technology change has been speeding up, prepare for a shock -- you ain't seen nothing yet. After the transistor gave us pervasive computing and the Internet made us all digitally connected, we've started to discover how much our world can change in just a few years. Now that advances in artificial intelligence are starting to kick in, that rate of change is set to surge to unprecedented new heights. We are at the next inflection point in humanity. The rate of change is now going to be measured in years or months.

In an unassuming two-storey Victorian town house in Bristol, the occupants are being filmed, monitored, and tracked by invisible sensors as they go about their business, 24 hours a day. What they lose in privacy could be our gain in life expectancy, if the long-term data bears out. Pivotal to the 15-million Sensor Platform for Healthcare in a Residential Environment (SPHERE) project, the house has been invisibly fitted with dozens of cameras and sensors while its occupants are asked to don wearable devices. The aim is to reveal how health is related to everyday lifestyle and living conditions over time. The smart home observes how long the occupants slouch in front of the TV as opposed to sitting or walking or exercising.

Artificial intelligence (AI) may conjure up far-fetched ideas of robot assistants, or perhaps an all-seeing presence like HAL 9000, the sentient machine in the movie 2001. But the likelier truth is that AI will come in the form of software running in your data center. And it will be coming very soon: Research firm Gartner predicts that "smart machines" will have a widespread impact on business within the next four years. In general terms it's likely that AI will be able to help IT departments do their job - and help businesses be more productive – by ensuring that "processes get applied, stuff is accurate, errors are eliminated, and compliance is met," according to Dr Stuart Anderson, a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. It will also be quite unremarkable, according to some.

While traveling in Western Samoa many years ago, I met a young Harvard University graduate student researching ants. He invited me on a hike into the jungles to assist with his search for the tiny insect. He told me his goal was to discover a new species of ant, in hopes it might be named after him one day. Whenever I look up at the stars at night pondering the cosmos, I think of my ant collector friend, kneeling in the jungle with a magnifying glass, scouring the earth. I think of him, because I believe in aliens--and I've often wondered if aliens are doing the same to us.

Most smart software in use today specializes on one type of data, be that interpreting text or guessing at the content of photos. Software in development at IBM has to do all those at once. It's in training to become a radiologist's assistant. The software is code-named Avicenna, after an 11th century philosopher who wrote an influential medical encyclopedia. It can identify anatomical features and abnormalities in medical images such as CT scans, and also draws on text and other data in a patient's medical record to suggest possible diagnoses and treatments.

This week, banker's fears were confirmed and the robot revolution has begun. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) will sack hundreds of face-to-face advisers and replace them with a robo-advisory online service, after the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) approved this technology. "Our customers increasingly want to bank with us using digital technology. As a result, we are scaling back our face-to-face advisers and significantly investing in an online investing platform that enables us to help a new group of customers with as little as 500 to invest," a RBS and NatWest spokesperson said in a statement according to the BBC. More and more banks are searching for digital options because they are cheaper and easier to use, and this attitude is advocated by the FCA.

Being well-informed and able to view things in the longterm can make all the difference when it comes to financial decisions. We have already seen the likes of a tech assistant using big data to help people get the best exchange rates, and now Pefin can help even more. The artificial intelligence platform, which is currently in Beta, is a financial advisor that is significantly cheaper than its human counterparts. If you're already a member, log in to keep reading.

Atom Bank is offering customer support via machine learning software on its mobile app. The bank, which gained its licence last year, delivers its products and services through an app for mobile devices and desktop computers. It is integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into its mobile app, which it said will provide near-human customer care. The machine learning technology from WDS – part of Xerox – will use analytics to capture the context of each customer inquiry and respond appropriately. It will also learn from experience.

Daniel Faggella is founder of TechEmergence, a news and advice website for entrepreneurs and investors interested in the intersection of technology and the mind. "Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next ten." These words, articulated by Neil Armstrong at a speech to a joint session of Congress in 1969, fit squarely into most every decade since the turn of the century, and it seems to safe to posit that the rate of change in technology has accelerated to an exponential degree in the last two decades, especially in the areas of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Artificial intelligence is making an extreme entrance into almost every facet of society in predicted and unforeseen ways, causing both excitement and trepidation.

Some 250 billion billion (250 x1018) transistors were produced in 2014. That means that every second of that year, on average, 8 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.