SAN FRANCISCO: Mark Zuckerberg envisions a software system inspired by the "Iron Man" character Jarvis as a virtual butler managing his household. The Facebook founder's dream is about artificial intelligence, which is slowly but surely creeping into our daily lives, no longer just science fiction. Artificial intelligence or AI is getting a foothold in people's homes, starting with the Amazon devices like its Echo speaker which links to a personal assistant "Alexa" to answer questions and control connected devices such as appliances or light bulbs. Analyst Carolina Milanesi of the research firm Creative Strategies said that "2016 was the year about raising awareness, and exposing consumers to the idea of AI in a more mass market way." Milanesi said it may take time for the technology to fulfill its potential, noting that companies need "a strong hook" to bring large numbers of consumers into this world.

Machines may soon be trying to master just about anything you can do on a computer. Open AI, a nonprofit dedicated to pursuing big advances in AI and making that progress freely available to anyone, has released Universe, a platform that will let AI programs learn, through experimentation and positive reward, how to do all sorts of things on a computer. Universe will include more than a thousand games, but also desktop programs such as Web browsers. It will make it possible for AI researchers to train programs to do all sorts of new tricks, including potentially useful tasks like filling out online forms, responding to e-mails, and updating spreadsheets. But Ilya Sutskevar, cofounder and research director at OpenAI, says the motivation for developing and releasing Universe is a lot bigger.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere, from autonomous cars made by Google and Tesla to Siri the virtual assistant.

Has Deep Learning Made Traditional Machine Learning Irrelevant?

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All you need to follow along are eyes, Python, a computer, and a bit of machine learning magic. He gives a good introduction to the idea. You take a histogram of the colors in a properly cropped and filtered photo of the object you want to identify. You then feed that into a neural network and train it to identify the different superheroes by color. When you feed it a new image later, it will compare the new image's histogram to its model and output confidences as to which set it belongs.

Evernote is trying to improve its digital-note-taking service, but it needs to access and read customer notes to do so. In a corporate blog post published this week, the company said it's updating the terms of its privacy policy to include a change that lets its employees access user notes to improve its machine-learning technologies. Machine learning technologies can allow powerful software to sift through data to find patterns and better automate tasks. Evernote said the decision to have some of its employees read user notes, effective Jan. 27, 2017, was done to "make sure that our machine learning technologies are working correctly, in order to surface the most relevant content and features to you." The company elaborated that although its current "computer systems do a pretty good job, sometimes a limited amount of human review is simply unavoidable in order to make sure everything is working exactly as it should."

The rapid and inexorable progress in the development of artificial intelligence has raised understandable concerns over the risks the technology poses to job security. There is a palpable fear that humans will quickly become obsolete, with some suggesting that up to half of existing jobs could be automated. This viewpoint is oversimplified, write Ravin Jesuthasan, Tracy Malcolm, and George Zarkadakis for the Harvard Business Review, as it fails to consider that automation will affect only certain tasks within specific jobs of a given occupation (when evaluated this way, only 9% of jobs are at a high risk of automation). In this more nuanced understanding, AI will simply force us to rethink our job descriptions, rather than eliminating work altogether. Already AI is having a significant impact on how we do our jobs, from streamlining administrative tasks to expediting medical research, and this rapid evolution requires a new way of thinking about the value of an employee and her performance.

The next stage of evolution for AI is democratization. That means making it available to businesses of all sizes, and not just to companies like Microsoft, Google or Apple. The opportunity in front of us is using AI to transform how we operate our businesses, no matter the size or industry. Contemporary AI techniques have given us magic in areas like speech recognition and image labeling, but there is much more work to be done. Think of your business and where you or your team make decisions about resource allocation.

Autonomous machines shining lasers at ants -- and spraying water at bewildered cats -- for the amusement of cackling grandchildren. Hobbyists are just getting started with deep-learning technologies that give them cheap, off-the-shelf capabilities that put Ronald Reagan's Star Wars program to shame. In the latest edition of the AI Podcast, NVIDIA engineer Bob Bond and Make: Magazine Executive Editor Mike Senese explain to host Michael Copeland how they've taken the once esoteric technology of deep learning and put it to work on offbeat projects that can be tackled on budgets of a few hundred bucks. "One of the big things that's happening -- and it's happening in real time right now -- is the technology is finally hitting a point where we, as consumers, have access to this type of capability," Senese says. Bond, a veteran engineer, is no technical novice.