The road ahead for artificial intelligence (AI) depended on and would be driven by human intentions, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said here today. He was speaking after dedicating the Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence in suburban Kalina to the nation. "It is our intention that will determine outcomes of AI," Modi said. "With every technological revolution, the scalability of technology has increased manifold. This has given humans increasingly more power," he said.

The scale and the surge in attention to artificial intelligence is not a new concept as the ideology behind the human-machine collaboration has been floating around since the 1980s but various factors contributed to the idea being put on hold for a while especially the lack of attention and funding. Billions of dollars are being annually invested in the industry for its research and development. The evolution of hardware and software programs and the innovation of cloud processing and computing power has put an additional advantage to the future of artificial intelligence. The innovation of cloud storage has enabled easy access to otherwise locked data that wasn't made available to the public. Before cloud storage became mainstream, accessing data was a costly affair for data scientists in need of data for research, but now governments, research institutes, businesses are unlocking data that were once confined to tape cartridges and magnetic disks.

Machine learning is all about faster processing of massive amounts of data, no? Take the new iPhone camera for example. It has an image signal processor (ISP) enhanced by machine learning that makes editing photos more intelligent.