AI Week: How government learned to stop worrying and love AI

It is often the case that, if you look a little too closely at the next big thing in the technology industry, it may start to resemble the last big thing. Or perhaps even one of the many big things that came before that. When many were congratulating Apple for inventing the tablet market with the release of the iPad in 2010, many more were pointing to the touchscreen devices manufactured over the previous two decades by the likes of Palm, FSC, and Nokia – not to mention Apple itself. When the concept of cloud computing began to go mainstream, there were plenty of onlookers who wondered whether this exciting new concept was really just a synonym for the internet, or virtualisation, or software as a service or, simply, 'someone else's computer'. Artificial intelligence – perhaps the biggest and nextest of the current next big things – is also nothing new, many would argue.