A good year for Artificial Intelligence

The year 2017 was a seminal year for the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Suddenly, everyone everywhere was talking about AI, what it means, and how it will affect human societies and economies. Jobs, warfare, healthcare, film-making, even art--no area of human enterprise seemed to be immune from discussions of the coming machine onslaught. Overall, there were three very important outcomes for the field of AI in 2017. First, technologically, the single most important breakthrough in 2017 was the development of Google Deep Mind's AlphaGo Zero. AlphaGo Zero built on the earlier astonishing success of the AlphaGo program, which mastered the game of Go--an East Asian game widely believed to be significantly more complex than chess.