Machine learning has been a constant on tech trend lists for years. This year, it's time to embrace what humans can learn by interacting with machine learning. As Google's head of Machine Intelligence, Blaise Aguera y Arcas noted in a recent Medium article: "Machine intelligence will expand our understanding of both external reality and our perceptual and cognitive processes." In the spring of 2016, Google's AlphaGo software, fueled by machine learning, beat the world's greatest human Go player, Lee Sedol. The victory was a major milestone for a specific type of AI, called deep neural networks, that is more closely modeled on the way humans think.

Eric is responsible for the development of strategic products, services and solutions. He joined Esker in 2002 as Director of Marketing Communications, and in 2005, extended his responsibilities to include product management. Many businesses have yet to understand the full potential of machine learning and cognitive computing for back office processes. The benefits range far beyond simply increased productivity and faster supply chains. Today's advanced algorithms have the computational power and speed to gather, analyze and manage vast repositories of data.

Google's AI research lab, Google Brain is reportedly developing AI (artificial intelligence) software that can build more machine learning software. The ultimate aim to design such software is to reduce the costs of hiring experts for making machine learning software and make it more accessible and efficient in the future by spreading the benefits of the technology far and wide. If using AIs techniques become more practical, they could increase the speed at which new AIs can be made and implemented across the economy. Currently, companies are paying a premium to hire machine-learning experts, who are in short in supply. In recent months, several other groups have also reported progress on getting learning software to make learning software.

In this week's Abundance Insider: Self-organizing drone swarms, synthetic stem cells, and an AI that can detect heart failure better than human doctors. I'm launching an online course with SUCCESS Magazine called Xponential Advantage. It's aimed to inspire, educate and guide a new breed of "Exponential Entrepreneurs," and is an expansion of my core content from Abundance and BOLD, the keynotes I give to Fortune 500 executive teams, and some of the material I teach executives who attend Singularity University. These are the areas I truly believe an exponential entrepreneur can leverage to have a billion-person impact. What it is: Scientists at the London Institute of Medical Services have created an AI capable of predicting with 80% accuracy which patients would die of pulmonary hypertension within a year, beating the average doctor's prediction accuracy by about 20%.

What do you think of when you think about chatbots? If you're like many others, it's possible that you think of them as nothing more than that annoying little window that pops up when you're visiting a website. You know what I'm talking about - the one that claims to be able to answer your questions. You may have had both positive and negatives experiences with chatbots. Some of you may even ignore them altogether.

Cancer is a devastating disease and statistics now suggest that nearly one in every two people worldwide will develop cancer at some point in their lives. Although there are various treatments available that are improving all the time, there is still no cure for cancer. Research in developing effective cancer treatments has been going on for decades, and now researchers are turning to the help of AI in hopes of finding a cure for the disease. But one thing that is needed for searching for a cure for cancer, even when using AI, is data. The problem with this is that a lot of data including mammograms, genetic tests, and medical records are still under lock and key and not available to those who can make use of it. However, on the flip side, there are now a number of large scale initiatives in place that are willing to share data and make it easy to do so.

When Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) suggests you "tag" a friend in a photo, it generally suggests that friend's name. That small interaction provides a glimpse into the world of an emerging and powerful aspect of artificial intelligence (AI) in action -- image recognition. With its treasure trove of words and pictures from 1.79 billion monthly active users, it is using that data, combined with recent advancements in AI, to propel this and other technological advances. Facebook may well have the lead in facial recognition, even extending a step further into the realm of facial verification. It released a research paper in 2014 in which it reported 97.35% accuracy, which approaches human levels of recognition. So accurate, in fact, that Facebook removed the feature for European Union citizens at the EU's request to protect privacy.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no more the theme for science fiction or Hollywood movie. The fusion of cyber and the manual task is transforming the economic and security landscape not only in India, but across the world. Artificial intelligence is not something new. However, AI is an important development and consumers in India will witness its prominent role – both in society and at work – in 2017. In addition, there is expectation that the use of artificial intelligence will proliferate across multiple business, social and government spheres.

Why is it that every time humans develop a really clever computer system in the movies, it seems intent on killing every last one of us at its first opportunity? In Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 starts off as an attentive, if somewhat creepy, custodian of the astronauts aboard the USS Discovery One, before famously turning homicidal and trying to kill them all. In The Matrix, humanity's invention of AI promptly results in human-machine warfare, leading to humans enslaved as a biological source of energy by the machines. In Daniel H. Wilson's book Robopocalypse, computer scientists finally crack the code on the AI problem, only to have their creation develop a sudden and deep dislike for its creators. Is Siri just a few upgrades away from killing you in your sleep? And you're not an especially sentient being yourself if you haven't heard the story of Skynet (see The Terminator, T2, T3, etc.) The simple answer is that -- movies like Wall-E, Short Circuit, and Chappie, notwithstanding -- Hollywood knows that nothing guarantees box office gold quite like an existential threat to all of humanity. Whether that threat is likely in real life or not is decidedly beside the point. How else can one explain the endless march of zombie flicks, not to mention those pesky, shark-infested tornadoes? The reality of AI is nothing like the movies. Siri, Alexa, Watson, Cortana -- these are our HAL 9000s, and none seems even vaguely murderous. The technology has taken leaps and bounds in the last decade, and seems poised to finally match the vision our artists have depicted in film for decades. Is Siri just a few upgrades away from killing you in your sleep, or is Hollywood running away with a tired idea? Looking back at the last decade of AI research helps to paint a clearer picture of a sometimes frightening, sometimes enlightened future. An increasing number of prominent voices are being raised about the real dangers of humanity's continuing work on so-called artificial intelligence.