From chess computers to self-driving cars, here's where AI is heading

On Wednesday, a Google deep-learning program beat the world's best player at Go -- an ancient Chinese game once considered too complex and nuanced for a computer to ever master. This game comes 20 years after IBM's Deep Blue computer first beat reigning world champion Garry Kasparow in a game of chess. Though pitting AIs against humans in games of strategy does offer some insight into how the field of machine learning is progressing, the increasing presence of AI in our daily lives shows that the technology is reaching a point where it will soon be hard to imagine what the world used to be like. Machine learning computers perform mundane tasks for us -- like completing our sentences, or finding the fastest route home. But they also do tasks we're incapable of doing, like sorting through and spotting patterns in incredibly large and complex data sets. Chicago is home to a number of companies doing big things in the AI and machine learning field.