When we heard that two Facebook artificial intelligence programs had to be shut down because they were talking to each other in a language we couldn't understand, things got weird. Is the age of true artificial intelligence upon us? It's become a hot topic in recent years, with entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg arguing that it will be wholly beneficial for humanity, while others like Elon Musk saying that it could be one of the greatest threats to humanity. Let's find out the real story behind artificial intelligence. Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikeohhello

WASHINGTON - Over the 20th century, the development of automated machinery has propelled modern industry and manufacturing into new heights of productivity. However, the cost of this technological advancement has been the displacement of millions of blue collar jobs across the world. In contrast, white-collar labour has always been regarded as safe from the kind of automation that contracted the manufacturing workforce. The thought of machines replacing educated and skilled professionals had usually seemed a distant problem of the future - until now. In the past few years, advancement in artificial intelligence has skyrocketed and computers are now learning to solve complex problems better and faster than human beings. As learnings algorithms and computing power continue to become more powerful, many jobs that were once thought to be impossible to automate are slowly but surely shifting towards a silicon workforce.

Artificial neural networks were inspired by the human brain and simulate how neurons behave when they are shown a sensory input (e.g., images, sounds, etc). They are known to be excellent tools for image recognition, any many other problems beyond that - they also excel at weather predictions, breast cancer cell mitosis detection, brain image segmentation and toxicity prediction among many others. Deep learning means that we use an artificial neural network with multiple layers, making it even more powerful for more difficult tasks. This time they have been shown to be apt at reproducing the artistic style of many famous painters, such as Vincent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso among many others. All the user needs to do is provide an input photograph and a target image from which the artistic style will be learned.