AI and ML present a new dawn in the cybersecurity industry. AI is not a new concept to computing. It was defined in 1956 as the ability of computers to perform tasks that were characteristic of human intelligence. Such tasks included learning, making decisions, solving problems, and understanding and recognizing speech. ML is a broad term referring to the ability of computers to acquire new knowledge without human intervention. ML is a subset of AI and can take many forms, such as deep learning, reinforcement learning, and Bayesian networks.

As computers gain speed and accomplish dazzling feats like defeating the world's masters at games of chess and Go, some of the planet's brightest minds -- Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking among them -- warn that we human beings may find ourselves obsolete. Further, a kind of artificial intelligence arms race may come to dominate geopolitics, rewarding the owners of the best AI mining the biggest pools of "big data" -- most likely, as a result of its sheer size, China. Or consider another dire consequence: As AI-driven robots replace more and more workers, from truck drivers to insurance adjusters, loan officers and any number of other white-collar occupations, unemployment will rise. Should we imagine a utopia filled with gratifying leisure activities or a feudal dystopia in which a wealthy elite hold the few precious jobs unsuitable for computers? But the terms of the debate thus far are confused. The recent advances in AI are impressive, and the future prospects for the technology are truly amazing.

Given the speed at which researchers are advancing artificial intelligence, the question has become not if A.I. will become smarter than its human creators, but when? A team of researchers from Yale University and Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute recently set off to determine the answer. During May and June of 2016, they polled hundreds of industry leaders and academics to get their predictions for when A.I. will hit certain milestones. The findings, which the team published in a study last week: A.I. will be capable of performing any task as well or better than humans--otherwise known as high-level machine intelligence--by 2060 and will overtake all human jobs by 2136. Those results are based on the 352 experts who responded.