Simply mentioning these fields conjures up images inspired by science fiction. Robots that compose music and write novels. Computers that mimic human emotion and predict the future. Yet despite the futuristic visions that these subjects conjure, the reality of AI/ML, on the operations side, has much in common with the past. In the early days of the internet, web developers, the trailblazers of their time, built almost everything from scratch.

Rapper, producer and technology entrepreneur will.i.am "The investment that society has put in AI (artificial intelligence) surpasses the investment for HI, which is human intelligence," said Will.i.am during a panel at the Dell Technologies World 2019 Conference on Wednesday. "It's so lopsided that subconsciously we know that we haven't invested in our youth, in our communities. We haven't invested in humanity to keep up with intelligent machines." Will.i.am was joined by Dell Chief Marketing Officer Allison Dew as well as Brynn Putnam, founder and CEO of Mirror, which makes a full-length mirror that doubles as a screen for streaming home workout classes.

Check out "AI: A Force for Good" at the Artificial Intelligence Conference in New York City, April 29-May 2, 2018. What do artificial intelligence (AI), invention, and social good have in common? While on the surface they serve very different purposes, at their core, they all require you to do one thing in order to be successful at them: think differently. Take the act of inventing--in order to develop a great patent, trade secret, or other intellectual property, you need to think outside of the box. Similarly, at the heart of AI is the act of unlocking new capabilities, whether that's making virtual personal assistants like Alexa more useful, or creating a chatbot that provides a personalized experience to customers.

The AI startup landscape report has been divided into two sub-sectors -- infrastructure companies, which provide cloud infrastructure, algorithms, libraries for creating AI based applications. Examples of infrastructure services include AI as a service (Data Robot, Sentient), NLP as a service (Nuance, SpinVox), and computer vision as a service (Face). The second sub-sector -- AI applications looks at companies developing applications based on artificial intelligence technologies for different verticals. These include companies leverage AI techniques to build applications tailored for end use in enterprise (Palantir, Dataminr, Cylance), industry (ButterFly Network, Zest Finance) and consumer (X.ai, Anki) markets. Over 1.2B has been invested in AI infrastructure startups since 2010 with 540M being invested in 2015-16.

Brian Lesko and Dan Sherman hate the idea of driverless cars, but for very different reasons. Lesko, 46, a business-development executive in Atlanta, doesn't trust a robot to keep him out of harm's way. "It scares the bejeebers out of me," he says. Sherman, 21, a mechanical-engineering student at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, trusts the technology and sees these vehicles eventually taking over the road. But he dreads the change because his passion is working on cars to make them faster.