In Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the on-board computer known as HAL calmly tells the astronaut Dave Bowman that it will not open the doors of the space pod to allow him entry. HAL has mistakenly identified Dave as a threat to the mission and addresses him directly, idiomatically and politely. It is a terrifying scene, symbolising the power of artificially intelligent machines that have acquired language and reason. New research suggests to some that the ability of humans to speak to machines may soon arrive. Linguists researching Jingulu, an aboriginal language spoken by just a few people in the Australian outback, suggest that it has certain characteristics that make it easily translatable into AI commands.

AI will help create 2.3 million jobs while eliminating 1.8 million jobs in 2020, although new types of skills will be needed "AI promises to be the most disruptive class of technologies during the next 10 years due to advances in computational power, volume, velocity and variety of data, as well as advances in deep neural networks (DNNs)," says John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. Thus, AI technologies are prompting technology strategic planners to redraw near-term and long-term product plans, says Lovelock. By 2020, he states, at least 40 per cent of people will interact primarily with people-literate technologies, removing much of the perceived need to invest further in improving computer literacy. Virtual private assistants (VPAs) and voice response systems, such as Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant and Siri, are becoming the norm for consumer interaction with search engines, along with many other services that would previously need interaction via web browsers, he says. "For many users, this AI functionality will become the norm, and there will no longer be the need to understand, or use, traditional computer operating systems or applications for many tasks," notes Lovelock.

From Silicon Valley's perspective, Brexit, President Trump, and populist revolts around the world are incongruous to what is really going on. Large numbers of workers are getting left behind in the wake of automation and artificial intelligence and most governments are not nearly nimble enough to react. Most people have a skewed perception of their role in a situation, as well as others' motives. The majority will happily take credit for positive outcomes, while often feeling victimized by negative ones. There's a push to return to the days where people weren't feeling choked economically.

The working relationship between people and technology is fundamentally shifting. Employees used to learn the language of business applications to use them. A world where Shift F9 created a new line item entry in their expenses. Since then, advances in user experience design have masked the language of technology with buttons and guided navigation. The user training toll has decreased but it has by no means gone away.