Once-speculative concerns about the technology have now become pressing matters. AI has ascended to the role of main character. When Donald Trump traveled to Beijing for an historic summit last week, AI was one of the central topics of his discussions with Xi Jinping. As the two nations remain locked in a technological arms race, the president brought along some of the United States' most powerful AI executives, including Elon Musk and Nvidia's Jensen Huang. A continent away, the European Union has been unsuccessfully petitioning Anthropic to grant access to its advanced cybersecurity model, Mythos. Back in the United States, millions of students and teachers are dealing with the fallout of a devastating ransomware attack on the software platform Canvas--a hack that was likely aided by AI tools.

If there is one thing the general public is familiar with when the use of artificial intelligence than it is facial recognition. Whether it is opening their mobile phone or the algorithms Facebook uses to find eyes or other parts of a face in images, facial recognition has become a standard. But now scientists dealing with complex questions like the composition of the universe are starting to use a modified version of the'standard' facial recognition in an attempt to discover how much of the dark matter there is in the universe and where it is possibly located. As Digital Trends and Futurity note in their reports on the subject, "physicists believe that understanding this mysterious substance is necessary to explain fundamental questions about the underlying structure of the universe." It is the researchers gathered in Alexandre Refregier's group at the Institute of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at ETH Zurich, Switzerland that has started to use deep neural network methods that lie behind facial recognition to develop new, special tools to attempt to discover what is still a secret of the universe for us. As Janis Fluri, one of the researchers working on the project told Digital Trends, "The algorithm we [use] is very close to what is commonly used in facial recognition," adding that"the beauty of A.I. is that it can learn from basically any data.

As early as 2018, we can expect to see truly autonomous weaponised artificial intelligence that delivers its blows slowly, stealthily and virtually without trace. And 2018 will be the year of the machine-on-machine attack. There is much debate about the possible future of autonomous AI on the battlefield. Once released, these systems are not controlled. They do not wait for orders from base.