Emotional AI coming soon?

Nowadays Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be on everyone's lips. This was emphasised once again at the most recent TechCrunch Disrupt event, held in San Francisco in mid-September, where the topic was raised in almost every discussion. Machine learning is a particularly fertile area of Artificial Intelligence. Danny Lange, Head of Machine Learning at Uber, believes that the best way of describing the concept – which everyone is talking about without actually knowing exactly what it involves – is to regard it as a paradigm shift. "We're moving from a Newtonian, deterministic way of writing software, where the all-knowing programmer writes a complete model of your world, and we're seeing this major shift to more of a Heisenberg world, where it's about uncertainty and probabilities. Basically we're now using experience, using data, to have learning algorithms build and use these models and get results that are really predictions with probabilities, rather than having finite deterministic programmes. And as the world changes the data changes and we rebuild the models. This allows us to continuously have a software system that is more in line with the real world," he explained to the TechCrunch Disrupt audience.