Most individuals aren't well-versed in AI, which makes it difficult for them to put fear aside and understand how to use ML. By helping to automate office tasks like billing and accounting, AI is taking mundane tasks off workers' to-do lists, not eliminating jobs or scheming to destroy humankind. Rather than worrying about a generation of Normans hijacking your industry, read up on what AI can and cannot do. The deeper your education, the less afraid of AI you'll be.

In one of the big musical numbers from The Life Of Brian, Eric Idle reminds us to "always look on the bright side of life." Norman, a new artificial intelligence project from MIT, doesn't know how to do that. That's because Norman is a psychopath, just like the Hitchcock character that inspired the research team to create him. Like so many of these projects do, the MIT researchers started out by training Norman on freely available data found on the Web. Instead of looking at the usual family-friendly Google Images fare, however, they pointed Norman toward darker imagery.