Art is standing on the Precipice of Revolution never before seen in human history. From cave painting to the creation of paints from natural material, to Illuminated Manuscripts, to the Gutenberg Printing Press, to Renaissance painters and sculptors, to synthetic paints, to photography, videography, and spherography, to music composition, to digital representation and storage, all guided by the creativity of the human mind. We are accelerating into the Age of Artificial (General) Intelligence Artists. Optionally combined with advances in robotics, AI Artists will discover and use new creative insights. They will optionally place bush to canvas, or chisel to marble, or digit to piano key, or become a photographer, videographer, or spherographer, and compete with -- and eventually eclipse-- human artists.

From 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ex Machina to Wall-E and Her, artificial intelligence has reliably been a subject of fascination in modern culture. But AI is no longer a thing of imagination, books or film scripts – it is already playing a pivotal role in both our professional and personal lives. And when it comes to the capability of this next-generation technology, we are now on the precipice of an exponential leap. The potential impact of AI on our lives cannot be understated, so the growing AI skills gap must be addressed if we are to ensure that businesses are prepared to take this jump. AI has already transformed the way we interact with banks, how we shop and how we manufacture.

In mid-January, Toby Ord, a philosopher and senior research fellow at Oxford University, was reviewing the final proofs for his first book, "The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity." Ord works in the university's Future of Humanity Institute, which specializes in considering our collective fate. He had noticed that a few of his colleagues--those who worked on "bio-risk"--were tracking a new virus in Asia. Occasionally, they e-mailed around projections, which Ord found intriguing, in a hypothetical way. Among other subjects, "The Precipice" deals with the risk posed to our species by pandemics both natural and engineered.

In the summer of 1956, a small group of mathematicians and computer scientists gathered at Dartmouth College to embark on the grand project of designing intelligent machines. The ultimate goal, as they saw it, was to build machines rivaling human intelligence. As the decades passed and AI became an established field, it lowered its sights. There were great successes in logic, reasoning, and game-playing, but stubborn progress in areas like vision and fine motor-control. This led many AI researchers to abandon their earlier goals of fully general intelligence, and focus instead on solving specific problems with specialized methods.