Neural networks are a kind of machine-learning software loosely modeled on the human brain. The use of these networks has been responsible for …

Artificial intelligence or our capability of inventing systems that can think, create and act better and faster than humans has become a buzzword that everyone knows about. AI for medicine, AI for finance, AI for auto, we all seem to know and be fearful for the role of AI in next stage of human and industrial evolution. So, why is AI important in this time and age? Is it because the world is growing so rapidly in terms of our demands and we are not able to keep up with the pace of meeting those demands, as manual operations are inefficient? Or is it getting rid of human errors in execution?

There are giant, complex machines out there that we all rely on. Without them, civilisation as we know it would collapse. But these machines - power stations - are often pretty dumb, according to Peter Kirk, former chief executive of software company NeuCo. "Power plants," he says, "are just robots that don't have a brain yet." That is where his firm, acquired by GE Power last year, comes in. For years, NeuCo had been developing optimisation technologies - a form of artificial intelligence or AI - that can make power plants more efficient.

Artificial intelligence is already transforming everything from medicine to music. Manuela Saragosa speaks to three pioneers of this latest industrial revolution and asks what will be left for us humans to do? Professor Geoffrey Hinton, a father of AI, explains how neural networks revolutionised Google's translation services, and why we might one day be able to recreate consciousness in silicon. Ron Gutman of online medical service provider HealthTap introduces Manuela to the latest physician to join their team - Doctor AI. And Ed Newton-Rex, co-founder of music start-up Jukedeck, takes her through his playlist - which was entirely composed by his computer.

A high school junior has created a computer brain that can diagnose breast cancer with 99 percent sensitivity. Seventeen-year-old Brittany Wenger of Sarasota, Fla., wrote a breast cancer-diagnosing app based on an artificial neural network, basically a computer program whose structure is inspired by the way brain cells connect with one another. She won grand prize at the Google Science Fair for her invention in ceremony held in Palo Alto, Calif. Like other artificial intelligence programs, artificial neural networks "learn" what to do by analyzing examples they're given and they perform better if they get more examples. In addition, they're able to detect patterns in data that are too complex for human brains or other types of programs to analyze.