Andrew Moore, the Dean of the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science and a former Vice President at Google, just told me something exciting. Moore predicts that 2016 will see a rapid proliferation of research on machine emotional understanding in machines. Robots, smart phones, and computers will very quickly start to understand how we're feeling and will be able to respond accordingly. AI might be a hot topic but you'll still need to justify those projects. "There will be immediate positive uses," he explains over the phone.

Artificially intelligent self-driving cars aren't a technological evolution that everyone is entirely comfortable with just yet, but computer scientist Sebastian Thrun has enough optimism for all of us. Speaking at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco, Thrun said that not only does he think artificial intelligence is going to reshape the way we live, it's going to do so for the better. Thrun, a Stanford university professor who led Google's self-driving car project until 2014, said that as a result of technological advances over the past 200 to 300 years "we have turned ourselves into superhumans." According to Thrun, throughout history we've used technology to overcome our physical limitations and created ways to communicate across long distances, travel quickly across continents, and gather food more quickly than our ancestors ever could. Now we're moving onto the next stage and thanks to advances in AI the focus is going to shift from "replacing our muscles" to "making our brains stronger."