Mapping the future of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence already plays a major role in human economies and societies and it will play an even bigger role in the coming years. To ponder the future of artificial intelligence is thus to acknowledge that the future is artificial intelligence. This will be partly owing to advances in "deep learning," which uses multilayer neural networks that were first theorized in the 1980s. With today's greater computing power and storage, deep learning is now a practical possibility, and a deep-learning application gained worldwide attention in 2016 by beating the world champion in Go. Commercial enterprises and governments alike hope to adapt the technology to find useful patterns in "Big Data" of all kinds.