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As a species, we humans are awfully obsessed with the future. We love to speculate about where our evolution is taking us. We try to imagine what our technology will be like decades or centuries from now. And we fantasise about encountering intelligent aliens – generally, ones who are far more advanced than we are. Lately those strands have begun to merge. From the evolution side, a number of futurists are predicting the singularity: a time when computers will soon become powerful enough to simulate human consciousness, or absorb it entirely. In parallel, some visionaries propose that any intelligent life we encounter in the rest of the Universe is more likely to be machine-based, rather than humanoid meat-bags such as ourselves.

In 1981, science essayist Jeremy Bernstein wrote a piece for The New Yorker that touched upon a historic backgammon game two years earlier, in which reigning champ Luigi Villa lost to a computer. It was the first time an artificial-intelligence program had defeated a world champion at a board or card game. In the essay, Bernstein wrote: "What does this mean for us, for our sense of uniqueness and worth -- especially as machines evolve whose output we can less and less distinguish from our own?" He might have asked that decades ago, but the question is now more relevant than ever. Google's AlphaGo recently won four out of five matches against Go master Lee Sedol.

Mr Toyoda Toyota president announced that the car company would be launching a research company in silcon valley to develop artificial intelligence for use in cars and robotics. The Toyota research institute according to the company press release would make drive accessible to everyone regardless of inability. However the new company, which will have 200 employees and launch in 2016, will be looking to go "beyond" autonomous cars. Health, mobility and personal well being robotics to improve all aspects of human life. Toyota has previously said its first self-driving car will be out by 2020 and it has produced some robots which includes a series of nursing bots to help those with physical impairments.

In open sourcing its artificial intelligence engine--freely sharing one of its most important creations with the rest of the Internet--Google showed how the world of computer software is changing. These days, the big Internet giants frequently share the software sitting at the heart of their online operations. Open source accelerates the progress of technology. In open sourcing its TensorFlow AI engine, Google can feed all sorts of machine-learning research outside the company, and in many ways, this research will feed back into Google. But Google's AI engine also reflects how the world of computer hardware is changing.

Some of Japan's banks and insurance companies have started using artificial intelligence to handle customers' inquiries more efficiently over the phone and online. Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ's smartphone app features MAI, a virtual bank teller, who can respond to customers by understanding the nature of their queries. For instance, if a customer says, "I lost my ATM card," MAI will recognize the situation and tell the customer what to do. The Android version of the app has already been released. The iPhone version is expected to become available by the end of this month.

IBM has updated its artificial intelligence (AI) product, IBM Watson, giving it the ability to recognise images. Watson, which relies on cognitive learning to help it process the world in a human-like manner, can now'guess' what's happening in images fed to it via URLs. IBM has created a'Visual Recognition Demo' to showcase Watson's latest trick, which allows users to feed Watson an image before it tells you what it believes it sees. For example, supplying Watson with the image of a tiger throws up the result 77 per cent tiger, 26 per cent wild cat and 63 per cent cat. As well as identifying objects, people or animals in photos, Watson is also fairly adept at guessing what's going on in the background of images such as sunsets and other outdoor scenes.

Just over a week ago, Google Deepmind's AlphaGo machine crushed 18-time World Go Champion Lee Sedol 4-1 in a 5 game series, heralding an achievement many experts predicted to be at least a decade away. And whilst the victory of machine over man was a great result for Google, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) - it also served as a chilling reminder that the ever-extending arm of AI is showing absolutely no sign of slowing. DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis has stated that Go is "probably the most complex game ever devised by man." For starters, it's played on a 19 by 19 board, which allows for 10171 possible layouts, versus roughly 1050 possible configurations on a standard chessboard, and an estimated 1080 atoms in the universe. Because of this, players are often said to rely heavily on sub-conscious intuition or'gut feeling'.

Policymakers in Washington could learn something from Lee's agile response to the evolving challenges posed by the artificial-intelligence revolution. Artificial intelligence is on its way to ubiquity, and we're not ready for it. Already it has entered the landscape of the physical world in delightful and dangerous new ways, with Google leading the charge in many different industries. Yet policymakers seem trapped in the regulatory frameworks of the 20th century. In two of the most prominent A.I.-linked industries, autonomous vehicles and drones, current legal regimes are already insufficient.

It might not happen anytime soon, but then again, it might. In Japan, a short novel co-written by an artificial intelligence program (its co-author is human) made it past the first stage of a literary contest, the Japan News reports. The Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award is named after Hoshi Shinichi, a Japanese science fiction author whose books include "The Whimsical Robot" and "Greetings from Outer Space." Judges for the prize weren't told which novels were written by humans and which were penned by human-computer teams. The award is unique in that it accepts entries from "applicants who are not human beings (AI programs and others)."