The Pentagon is investing $2 billion into artificial intelligence

The Pentagon's high-tech research agency laid the groundwork for the Internet, stealth aircraft and self-driving cars. At its 60th anniversary conference on Friday, DARPA announced a $2 billion investment to push the frontier of AI forward. "We think it's a good time to seed the field of AI," John Everett, the deputy director of DARPA's Information Innovation Office, told CNNMoney. "We think we can accelerate two decades of progress into five years." Artificial intelligence, which lets machines perform tasks traditionally done by humans, is a trendy topic in technology and business circles. For example, Google recently delighted and alarmed observers when it showed how an AI system could call a restaurant and book a reservation while sounding entirely human.