Jeffrey Tarrant is a Wall Street guy. He spent the last thirty years investing in new hedge funds. As the founder and CEO of a firm called Protege Partners, he compares himself to Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator. What Altman does for Silicon Valley tech startups, Tarrant does for hedge funds. "I help seed them and incubate them," he says.

Zerto exhibited at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo, which took place at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, in June 2016. Zerto is committed to keeping enterprise and cloud IT running 24/7 by providing innovative, simple, reliable and scalable business continuity software solutions. Through the Zerto Cloud Continuity PlatformTM, organizations can seamlessly move and protect virtualized workloads between public, private and hybrid clouds. The company's flagship product, Zerto Virtual Replication, has become the standard for protection, recovery and migration of applications in cloud and virtualized data centers. All major researchers estimate there will be tens of billions devices - computers, smartphones, tablets, and sensors - connected to the Internet by 2020.

In 2012, a comic made its way around the internet listing games on a scale of how close they were to being dominated by artificial intelligence. Checkers and tic-tac-toe had already been conquered; chess's human champion had been dethroned, and IBM's Watson had taken no prisoners on Jeopardy. The "Computers may never outplay humans" section still had its stalwarts: Calvinball--the game in Bill Waterson's Calvin and Hobbes where the rules are made up on the fly--and Seven Minutes in Heaven. Just one step up, listed under "Computers still lose to top humans," were Chinese game Go and American pastime poker. Ph.D candidate Noam Brown is sitting next to a professional poker player closing out his 20th day of losing to Libratus, a poker-playing bot that Brown co-created at Carnegie Mellon University.

Last year, Google's DeepMind AI beat Lee Sedol at Go, a strategy game like chess, but orders of magnitude more complicated. The win was a remarkable step forward for the field of artificial intelligence, but it got Roger Melko, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, thinking about how neural networks--a type of AI modeled after the human brain--might be used to solve some of the toughest problems in quantum physics. Indeed, intelligent machines may be necessary to solve these problems. "The thing about quantum physics is it's highly complex in a very precise mathematical sense. A big problem we face when we study these quantum systems [without machine learning] is how to deal with this complexity," Melko told me.

If humankind wants to survive the rise of artificial intelligence, we need to embrace the machines and become a melded cyborg organism, projected Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, on Monday. Enhancing our minds is Musk's answer to finding the meaning of life. Musk has been a proponent of the human-A.I. mind-meld for a while: He's floated the idea of neural lace, a hypothetical computer processing net that can be injected into your brain to enhance intelligence. He seems pretty serious about enhancing humans to survive an A.I. takeover. "When I was a kid, I was wondering, 'What's the meaning of life -- you know, why are we here, what's it all about?' And I came to the conclusion that what really matters is trying to understand the right questions to ask. And the more that we can increase the scope and scale of human consciousness, the better we are able to ask these questions."

Artificial Intelligence is the next big thing in tech, however it's already all around us; from the news you see on social media, to Alexa and Siri. It wasn't going to be long until retailers sunk their teeth into this new tool and trend. Retailers have been following the same steps in recent years, with enhanced websites being made more user friendly and attractive, to easier access to payment methods and now they're focusing on AI. The retailers that aren't getting on board with this from the on-set, will be playing catch-up over the next few years, that's for sure! According to Gartner, by 2020, 85 percent of customer interactions in retail will be managed by AI.

However, while few are going to quibble when it provides such benefits, many are also expressing concerns about its potential impact, whether it will leave any jobs for us or if we will all end up as pets to robots. And these are not restricted to crackpots, some of the world's brightest minds have warned against its dangers. Stephen Hawking has argued that, 'The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,' and he is not alone. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak believes that, 'If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently,' while Elon Musk has noted that'With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it's like, yeah, he's sure he can control the demon.

In 1958, the Monotones asked, "Who Wrote the Book of Love?". If we fast forward 58 years to the present day, would the'Algorithm of Love' be a more accurate title? It is certainly a valid question; such is the popularity of the modern online dating website. Users can forego the inevitable awkwardness of blind or speed dating altogether, having found out every last detail about their date before they ever have to meet them in person. Most dating websites utilize some form of collaborative filtering or a'Netflix-style' recommendation algorithm that matches people with their potential partners based on shared interests and hobbies or mutual likes and dislikes.

The term Artificial Intelligence in 2017 feels a bit like cloud computing back in 2010 – it's the hot buzz phrase of the moment and it's being broadly over-applied and mis-applied in industry. I find that I can get asked about artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive computing, machine intelligence and advanced analytics all in the same meeting – and folks can end up using many of these terms almost interchangeably. Sometimes I want to carry around an AI buzzword bingo card. Over the recent holiday, several of us were brainstorming trying to provide some more definition to all of this. I've seen a definition of machine intelligence from Gartner Group that I very much like.

Using Machine learning algorithms, businesses can optimize and uncover new statistical patterns which form the backbone of predictive analytics.