Is the growth of AI a trend or a turning point?

I'm going to start this piece with a confession; I am a'trend' skeptic. Over the last few years I've developed something akin to list fatigue; growing weary of the constant stream of'six things you must know' clickbait headlines that pop up in my feed. If I was being kind I would say that as an industry we are sometimes guilty of exaggerating our predictions on the potential impact of emerging technologies (if I wasn't being kind I'd probably say that in truth a lot of our industry habitually over hypes everything'new' so that anything actually meaningful gets buried in the noise). Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of those topics that you'll regularly have seen on lists throughout 2016. And editorially, it's fair to say that it's been covered across something of a broad spectrum. A quick Google search will either lead you to an article where AI will bring an end to the food going off in your fridge, or where AI will bring an end to humanity.