Artificial Intelligence, thanks to a myriad of dystopian literature, has always been viewed with negative connotations, even though it's still hundreds of years away before total superiority, according to some people's calculations. Despite this, in the last few years, AI, and deep machine learning have gained truly significant, commercial application. As seen in the below chart from MIT, the adoption of AI by business has been happening at a dizzying pace. A pace that is expected to continue. The reasons for this are simple and relatively cyclical in explanation.

Service robots for personal and domestic use continue to grow. The forecast from 2016 through 2019 is expected to be $22 billion. Julian Jagtenberg, Co-Founder and Head of Growth, Somnox created a robot that has one job, to help you sleep better. The Dutch startup, with around $282k in funding, wants to reduce the effects of sleep deprivation with their robot that simulates natural breathing as you hold the robot to fall asleep. Jagtenberg looks at the shift from industrial to home robotics and the emergence of a new species in his predictions for robotics in 2019.

The chest rises and falls rhythmically, hypnotically. We guess it's the chest. Nobody's marketed a sleep robot before, and we're not even sure it's a robot. It looks like a pillowy four-pound kidney bean, about the size of a novelty prize at a carnival game. "Spooning the sleep robot during the night, you will be soothed to sleep," the sales literature claims, with "thousands of years of Buddhist breathing techniques."

There are so many things that could go wrong when you're sleeping with a robot. Or you could accidentally push the robot off the edge of the bed and smash it into a million pieces. In my case, the robot woke me up at 5AM saying "goodnight" in Dutch and started breathing. I'm talking about Somnox, "the world's first sleep robot," as it's been touted in pretty successful Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns. It's actually more of a peanut-shaped pillow than a humanoid robot that can perform backflips a la Boston Dynamics. But for a machine with no arms, legs, or even a face, it actually feels pretty human.