Machines That Think and Act on Their Own Are The Trend of the Decade Ahead

This technology will affect the quality, pace and structure of daily living for everyone. Believe it or not, robotic personal assistants at home -- particularly for older people -- will be common by 2025. With startling effect, machines increasingly will do the thinking for us. Big data, a computer's ability to gather vast amounts of information in complex databases, will be stored in the limitless spheres of Cloud technology. And the deep learning capability of artificial intelligence software, able to learn from its own mistakes and experiences to improve functionality, will progressively eliminate the need for thousands of tasks now performed by humans.