The future has arrived in Bakersfield, and I'm not sure I'm ready for it. For nearly three hours, the conversation was nonstop at the home of Audrey and Ken Mattlin, who happen to live with several robots. There's ElliQ, who resembles a table lamp and speaks mainly to Audrey, 84, whom the robot refers to by a nickname. As in, "How did you sleep, Jelly Bean?" Goo-goo-eyed Astro looks like a short-handled vacuum cleaner with an electronic tablet for a face. He scoots around the house on wheels and follows people on command.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay, and it's really very important for the psychiatric field to take a leading role in developing it.

Healthcare researchers have been exploring the use of artificial intelligence to help diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder by analyzing a patient's speech and to help treat anxiety and depression. Could AI replace a psychiatrist's role in providing mental health care? Most psychiatrists don't see AI making their jobs obsolete, according to a recent survey from Sermo, a social platform for physicians. Sermo teamed up with psychiatry and health technology researchers at Duke University School of Medicine and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School to query nearly 800 psychiatrists in 22 countries about the potential benefits and risks of using AI and machine learning in mental health and the impact on the field of psychiatry. Only 4% of psychiatrists believe AI will be able to replace, not just assist, human doctors in performing complex psychiatric tasks.

The research is part of a trend sweeping health care: the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to help better diagnose and treat patients. The goal is to capture information by monitoring their everyday movements and behaviors. This could yield insights never possible in a pre-digital age. It also, in the case of commercial companies, raises questions about how best to protect the privacy of research subjects. AI gives researchers a chance to get much more real-time information on how people function, says Jeffrey Kaye, director of the Oregon Center for Aging and Technology, part of Oregon Health & Science University.

When David Graham wakes up in the morning, the flat white box that's Velcroed to the wall of his room in Robbie's Place, an assisted living facility in Marlborough, Massachusetts, begins recording his every movement. It knows when he gets out of bed, gets dressed, walks to his window, or goes to the bathroom. It can tell if he's sleeping or has fallen. It does this by using low-power wireless signals to map his gait speed, sleep patterns, location, and even breathing pattern. All that information gets uploaded to the cloud, where machine-learning algorithms find patterns in the thousands of movements he makes every day.

Even as we try to wrap our heads around the idea of Artificial Intelligence, or AI, and understand its impact on our lives, our businesses and jobs, some experts suggest we may be barking up the wrong tree. The answers to our questions, they believe, may lie in a concept called Intelligence Augmentation, or IA. One of these experts, Murali Doraiswamy, a professor at Duke University, US, wrote in an opinion piece for the World Economic Forum in January that IA uses machine-learning technologies that are similar to AI, but instead of replacing humans, IA seeks to assist them. This characteristic, insists Prof. Doraiswamy, may ensure that IA will make more "progress and headlines" than AI. He adds that combining machine learning with the existing power of the human brain can help us get the best of both worlds.

Even as we try to wrap our heads around the idea of Artificial Intelligence, or AI, and understand its impact on our lives, our businesses and jobs, some experts suggest we may be barking up the wrong tree. The answers to our questions, they believe, may lie in a concept called Intelligence Augmentation, or IA. One of these experts, Murali Doraiswamy, a professor at Duke University, US, wrote in an opinion piece for the World Economic Forum in January that IA uses machine-learning technologies that are similar to AI, but instead of replacing humans, IA seeks to assist them. This characteristic, insists Prof. Doraiswamy, may ensure that IA will make more "progress and headlines" than AI. He adds that combining machine learning with the existing power of the human brain can help us get the best of both worlds.