What the AI? Trends in Artificial Intelligence, and What's to Come

Artificial Intelligence (AI): the term often brings to mind one of two distinct images of the future. The first: a world in which AI technologies have been implemented further into our daily lives -- improving our productivity by completing menial, time-consuming tasks automatically. The second, in the vein of Terminator or I, Robot, is a more bleak vision of self-driving cars and hyper-intelligent robots plotting against humanity. While a portion of the second scenario has already come to pass by way of automotive advances like Google's self-driving car, artificial intelligence experts and futurist thought leaders do not predict that a conflict between humans and AI is likely to come to pass (Sorry, James Cameron). For instance, Diamandis predicts that we will be able to produce an abundance of resources to meet future human needs through the use of AI technologies. AI technologies have already been integrated into almost every industry, from healthcare to financial trading to digital marketing.