Billionaire investor Mark Cuban is bullish on the future of artificial intelligence and has been for years. Not only has he made it a priority to learn about and invest in AI himself, but he has consistently recommended other entrepreneurs do the same. And if the ABC's "Shark Tank" star had to start a side hustle business today, that's where Cuban would turn. "I would become an expert in scripting for Alexa and Google Home and Cortana and go to any place that sold devices they supported and show them how much more they could do with a few hours of personalization," he tells CNBC Make It. By "scripting," Cuban is referring to the process of coding voice commands to create so-called "skills," which enable devices – like Amazon's Echo or Echo Dot, which use artificial intelligence-enabled voice assistant Alexa, Google Home or Microsoft's Cortana – to complete a task.

The use of robots in U.S. workplaces has more than doubled since the Great Recession, but the impact has hit certain areas of the country -- and segments of workers -- more than others. A recent report from The Century Foundation found Midwestern states such as Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin saw the sharpest growth in robots being used in the workplace from 2009 to 2017, and these areas now have the highest levels of "robot intensity" in the country. Robot intensity refers to the number of industrial robots per 1,000 human workers. The higher the number, the more robots there are in the workplace alongside humans. Areas with the highest robot intensity are home to some of the of the biggest manufacturing industries in the country.

So far, Agility Robotics has sold three Cassie robots (University of Michigan is a customer, for example) and has sales for another three in progress. The goal is to sell another six Cassie robots, "so optimistically 12 customers total for the entire production run of Cassie," Shelton tells CNBC Make It. "That is obviously, though, a relatively compact market, and is not why we're doing the company," says Shelton, in an interview with CNBC Make It. Indeed, the next generation of the company's legged robots will also have arms, says Shelton. And one target use for the more humanoid robot will be carrying packages from delivery trucks to your door. Shelton says his house is a perfect example of how a legged robot would assist in delivery.

Imagine a reality where computers can visualise what you are thinking. In late December, Guohua Shen, Tomoyasu Horikawa, Kei Majima and Yukiyasu Kamitani released the results of their recent research on using artificial intelligence to decode thoughts on the scientific platform, BioRxiv. Machine learning has previously been used to study brain scans (MRIs, or magnetic resonance imaging) and generate visualisations of what a person is thinking when referring to simple, binary images like black and white letters or simple geographic shapes (as shown in Figure 2 here). But the scientists from Kyoto developed new techniques of "decoding" thoughts using deep neural networks (artificial intelligence). The new technique allows the scientists to decode more sophisticated "hierarchical" images, which have multiple layers of colour and structure, like a picture of a bird or a man wearing a cowboy hat, for example.

Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, agrees that AI development will lead to unfounded innovation in a variety of sectors, which will ultimately increase job opportunities. "If you look at human history, any time there has been some major technological innovation, you ultimately have some significant increase in productivity that then creates the need for a new set of industries, a new set of jobs," says Levie. Chuck Edward, Microsoft's head of global talent acquisition, confirmed that artificial intelligence is one of the most in-demand industries in an interview with CNBC Make It and a quick google search shows hundreds of open positions within the company. IBM has also revamped its hiring practices in order to find fresh talent to fill these new AI roles. Joanna Daly, IBM's vice president of talent, tells CNBC Make It that the company will now now be focusing on skill-based hiring rather than education level.

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