2016 -- The Year of AI

This year has been a pivotal one for artificial intelligence, which has gone from an abstract and esoteric concept understood primarily through it's portrayal in sci-fi movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Terminator series (no wonder it's typically regarded as malevolent) to the centre-piece of todays zeitgeist as the singularity (the point when artificial intelligence becomes indistinguishable from human) draws near. Hyper personalisation and proactive intelligence have become expectations of software in 2016, and the big players in mobile and digital are striving for this through AI. The result is that we're tipping into another fundamental paradigm shift akin to the explosion of mobile. Let's take a look at some of the best of AI in 2016 and what we can expect in 2017 and beyond for industry, creativity and humanity. Greek mythology talks about mechanical humans, robots and artificial intelligences and it was all the way back in 1951 that the first AI capable of playing chess was shown off courtesy of the university of Manchester.