Why we are in the midst of an AI revolution

Everyone's talking about Machines At the start of the year I wrote a post about my personal experience on how Machine Learning (ML) could be used to augment human ability rather than replace it. Since then it has been hard to miss the increased number of articles in the mainstream press discussing how advancements in this field will reshape nearly every aspect of our lives and perhaps not always in a positive way. As the FT recently headlined it: "Robots: Friend or Foe?". So what will change exactly? In the near future we will be getting around in driverless Ubers, dealing with customer service bots, being operated on by robotic surgeons and once we have stopped working we can look forward to robot caregivers looking after us.