A brief introduction to Artificial Intelligence... for normal people

Lately, artificial intelligence has been very much the hot topic in Silicon Valley and the broader tech scene. To those of us involved in that scene it feels like an incredible momentum is building around the topic, with all kinds of companies building A.I. into the core of their business. There has also been a rise in A.I.-related university courses which is seeing a wave of extremely bright new talent rolling into the employment market. But this is not a simple case of confirmation bias - interest in the topic has been on the rise since mid-2014, as the graph below of Google Search frequency for the terms "Artificial Intelligence" and "Machine Learning" (more on that shortly) show: The noise around the subject is only going to increase, and for the layman it is all very confusing. Depending on what you read, it's easy to believe that we're headed for an apocalyptic Skynet-style obliteration at the hands of cold, calculating supercomputers, or that we're all going to live forever as purely digital entities in some kind of cloud-based artificial world.