These programs are trained to recognize patterns that indicate that something is fishy with a particular email. These programs can analyze thousands of emails in seconds and quarantine those that look iffy. As they grow and learn more about the patterns in suspicious emails, they become even more effective. The same is true of the anti-virus software that protects all our data.

Currently, we stand on the brink of a fourth Industrial revolution. Artificial Intelligence or AI is the intelligence demonstrated by machines for performing tasks. It is a specialized section of computer science which focuses on creating intelligent machines that think, react and work like humans. Some of the activities computers with artificial intelligence are built for includes problem solving, learning, analysing, speech recognition, and much more. AI is a vast field in itself, and it encompasses a wide spectrum of technologies such as Machine Learning, Automated Intelligence System, Deep learning, Neural Network, Computational Argumentation, and Multi-agent Systems to solve problems that currently seem impossible.

Google is training AI to identify human behavior, using clips from movies. Call it what you want, but AI by any name had the tech world uniquely divided in 2017, and the new year isn't likely to bring any quick resolutions. In case you missed it, the fiery debate over AI's potential impact on society was encapsulated by the opinions of two bold-face Silicon Valley names. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told the National Governors Association this fall that his exposure to AI technology suggests it poses "a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization." Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg parried such doomsday talk -- which would include cosmologist Stephen Hawking's view that AI could prove "the worst event in the history of civilization" -- with a video post calling such negative talk "pretty irresponsible."

Google is training AI to identify human behavior, using clips from movies. Call it what you want, but AI by any name had the tech world uniquely divided in 2017, and the new year isn't likely to bring any quick resolutions. In case you missed it, the fiery debate over AI's potential impact on society was encapsulated by the opinions of two bold-face Silicon Valley names. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told the National Governors Association this fall that his exposure to AI technology suggests it poses "a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization." Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg parried such doomsday talk -- which would include cosmologist Stephen Hawking's view that AI could prove "the worst event in the history of civilization" -- with a video post calling such negative talk "pretty irresponsible."

Google is training AI to identify human behavior, using clips from movies. Call it what you want, but AI by any name had the tech world uniquely divided in 2017, and the new year isn't likely to bring any quick resolutions. In case you missed it, the fiery debate over AI's potential impact on society was encapsulated by the opinions of two bold-face Silicon Valley names. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told the National Governors Association this fall that his exposure to AI technology suggests it poses "a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization." Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg parried such doomsday talk -- which would include cosmologist Stephen Hawking's view that AI could prove "the worst event in the history of civilization" -- with a video post calling such negative talk "pretty irresponsible."

NEW DELHI: Stephen Hawking had warned a few years ago that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could spell the end of human race, a threat echoed by Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, Bill Gates, and many others. This is the apocalyptic vision that the robots we create, may decide we are an obsolete model deserving "retirement". The truth, a more banal one, is that are we letting machine algorithms take over what were human decisions earlier, decision making of the governments, the businesses and even ours. Today, algorithms decide who should get a job, which part of a city needs to be developed, who should get into a college, and in the case of a crime, what should be the sentence. It is not super intelligence of robots that is the threat to life as we know it, but machines taking over thousands decisions that are critical to us and deciding social outcomes.

The terminators from Skynet, the agents of the Matrix, the Decepticons…Hollywood has done a good job portraying artificial intelligence (AI) as an existential threat to the human race. The scary thing is that this idea may not be purely science fiction. In fact, many leading technologists today seem to share the concern that at some point in the not-too-distant future, human kind could be beholden to super-intelligent computer overlords. That is a scary thing to think about, and even if the worse does not come to pass, AI will certainly impact everyone's life in some form or another. So let's look at some history of AI, its current state, and potential risks and possible outcomes.

The terminators from Skynet, the agents of the Matrix, the Decepticons…Hollywood has done a good job portraying artificial intelligence (AI) as an existential threat to the human race. The scary thing is that this idea may not be purely science fiction. In fact, many leading technologists today seem to share the concern that at some point in the not-too-distant future, human kind could be beholden to super-intelligent computer overlords. That is a scary thing to think about, and even if the worse does not come to pass, AI will certainly impact everyone's life in some form or another. So let's look at some history of AI, its current state, and potential risks and possible outcomes.