Two months after Google introduced Smart Reply, the company said it was already being used in 10 percent of all responses in the mobile Inbox app. Facebook, meanwhile, unveiled this month a neural network called DeepText, which it said "can understand with near-human accuracy the textual content of several thousands posts per second." Corrado urged me not to fear Smart Reply technology, however. In my sadness, I was willing to accept Smart Reply as an ally, not an enemy -- but not because it saved me from writing quick niceties.

"Artificial intelligence is the art and science of making machines intelligent," Corrado explained. According to Corrado, the brain's billions of neurons all make tiny decisions based on small amounts of information, but working together they can perform advanced thinking tasks. Moving back to the image recognition example, Corrado explained that these artificial neurons will individually scan tiny patches of pixels in an image and make some judgment about them. Asked how machine learning works for things like booking a movie ticket -- a task Google's AI-powered Google Assistant performed during CEO Sundar Pichai's keynote -- Corrado explained that parts of that task were not done by AI.