Artificial intelligence: it's already here

A 100 million financing round has raised a cyber-security company's value to 1 billion, garnering it membership of the so-called unicorn club. Not much to see here, you might say, given that the list of unicorns grows each day and analysts are divided between those who talk about a new bubble and those who insist that it's traditional companies that are overvalued. In other words, by training a machine to think like a hacker and apply the growing and constantly changing range of tools to try to detect the threats its clients face. The company, which has a long list of corporate clients and income stream very different to the typical startup that bets everything on future growth, is far from unique, and reflects the increasingly clear tendency trumpeted by Kevin Kelly in a 2014 Wired article called "The three breakthroughs that have finally unleashed AI on the world", which argues that the business plans of the next 10,000 startups were easy to predict: "take X and add some artificial intelligence." Those three elements are: the existence of ever-cheaper and more easily available cloud-based computing resources able to substitute the huge and expensive super-computers that used to carry out these complex and multi-dimensional tasks. Then there is the availability of ever-bigger archives of transactional and other types of data produced by the electronic tracing of our everyday lives, and that require immense data bases to train algorithms.