Geoffrey Hinton is a legendary computer scientist. When Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio were given the 2018 Turing Award, considered the Nobel prize of computing, they were described as the "Godfathers of artificial intelligence" and the "Godfathers of Deep Learning." Naturally, people paid attention when Hinton declared in 2016, "We should stop training radiologists now, it's just completely obvious within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists." The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first AI algorithm for medical imaging that year and there are now more than 80 approved algorithms in the US and a similar number in Europe. Yet, the number of radiologists working in the US has gone up, not down, increasing by about 7% between 2015 and 2019.

He described what it would be like for Washington to witness the technology of our time: cars, airplanes, the international space station. You could tell him about the large hadron collider and the theory of relativity, said Urban, and play him music that was recorded 50 years ago. "And this is all before he's seen the internet," said Urban, "the magical wizard rectangle in my pocket that can do a trillion crazy levels of sorcery, like pull open a map that can show where we are on it with a paranormal blue dot." Or let you hold a conversation with someone in Japan, on the other side of the world.

"Conversation is the new interface." The tech community's use of this expression does not mean that we are going to start talking to each other more on a human-to-human, face-to-face level. It means rather that we will be talking more to robots, specifically those artificial intelligence programs that pop up on the likes of Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Slack and so on, to help you with tasks from scheduling to shopping. Rather than going to a website to find information or downloading yet another app, we will summon these artificial intelligence assistants to do our bidding. Bark "find me a flight to Chicago on Saturday" into your phone and a "bot", which understands your location and the fact that you mean this Saturday, will return with some choices.