Reboot for the AI revolution

A robot conducts the Orchestra Filarmonica di Lucca at Teatro Verdi in Pisa, Italy, this September. The ongoing artificial-intelligence revolution will change almost every line of work, creating enormous social and economic opportunities -- and challenges. Some believe that intelligent computers will push humans out of the job market and create a new'useless class'; others maintain that automation will generate a wide range of new human jobs and greater prosperity for all. Almost everybody agrees that we should take action to prevent the worst-case scenarios. The automation revolution is emerging from the confluence of two scientific tidal waves. Computer scientists are developing artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that can learn, analyse massive amounts of data and recognize patterns with superhuman efficiency.