Yes, AI will soon be everywhere – but it will support humans, not replace them

Since 2009, technology has been steadily blurring which tasks are best performed by a human, and which by a machine – from smart home sensors to music made from generative algorithms and the use of artificial intelligence in places like hospitals and schools. Since the inception of WIRED UK in 2009, this world has grown and shifted in ways that would have been hard to predict – and what were once buzzwords, the offshoots of science fiction, have increasingly become a part of our everyday life. "We're in this period of a massive convergence of a number of very high level trends," says Jeremy Palmer, CEO of QuantumBlack, an advanced analytics firm which is a McKinsey company. "The amount and variety of data, computing power, infrastructure like cloud capabilities along with academic research and papers are all rapidly advancing. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are enabled by these things so we're seeing it embedded into real world applications more and more. For example, we are increasingly seeing artificial intelligence and machine learning being subsumed into industries like healthcare, education and architecture."