Machine-learning forms of artificial intelligence are going to produce a revolution in computer systems, a new kind of hardware-software union that can put AI in your toaster, according to AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton. Learn about the leading tech trends the world will lean into over the next 12 months and how they will affect your life and your job. Hinton, offering the closing keynote Thursday at this year's Neural Information Processing Systems conference, NeurIPS, in New Orleans, said that the machine learning research community "has been slow to realize the implications of deep learning for how computers are built." He continued, "What I think is that we're going to see a completely different type of computer, not for a few years, but there's every reason for investigating this completely different type of computer." All digital computers to date have been built to be "immortal," where the hardware is engineered to be reliable so that the same software runs anywhere.

The modern AI revolution began during an obscure research contest. It was 2012, the third year of the annual ImageNet competition, which challenged teams to build computer vision systems that would recognize 1,000 objects, from animals to landscapes to people. In the first two years, the best teams had failed to reach even 75% accuracy. But in the third, a band of three researchers--a professor and his students--suddenly blew past this ceiling. They won the competition by a staggering 10.8 percentage points.