AI: How we arrived at the 4th industrial revolution

You could be forgiven for wondering why AI is so big all of a sudden. Hasn't humankind been dreaming about human-like robots for a long time? The first Star Wars film (with crowd-pleasing'droids' R2D2, C-3PO) was released in 1977; Terminator (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cyborg assassin) was a massive success in the mid -1980s, a few years after Blade Runner (starring synthetic – or not? The idea of an intelligent machine is not exactly a new one, yet our ability to create something with Artificial Intelligence has increased dramatically in the last decade or so. There is now scope to use AI to make legal assessments, create games, predict purchases, navigate through traffic, translate words into different languages and diagnose diseases.