The experts predict robots will not be taking over as surgeons until around 2053, while it could take 43 years before machines are competing with mathematicians for space in top academic journals. They also predict AI computers could be churning out New York Times bestselling novels by 2049. In reality, machines are already dipping their digital fingers into this field too. Google has been training its AI on romantic novels and news articles in an attempt to help it write more creatively, and an AI bot called Benjamin can write short sci-fi film scripts – even if they don't entirely make sense. Then there is the work of Automated Insights, which has created algorithms that churn out millions of personalised news, finance and sports articles for companies like Reuters and the Associated Press. Adam Smith, chief operating officer at Automated Insights, says this technology is intended to complement, rather than replace, human expertise. "Automated journalism is creating content that would not have existed before, but humans still need to add context to those stories."

Some 70 years ago, computer scientist Alan Turing famously set the bar for artificial intelligence: a computer that could convince a human conversation partner that it was a person. On a recent spring afternoon in the Flow Machines laboratory, located on a quiet street in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris, senior researcher Pierre Roy was more concerned with his music-making AI software's ability to create a convincingly catchy song. "So far, from the technical standpoint, no one knows how to do a proper song, to tell a story," he said. "It's a hot topic in AI." Flow Machines, a project of Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Paris that receives funding from the European Research Council, is developing an AI program that can compose compelling, professional-quality music -- an aim shared by similar ventures such as Jukedeck in the UK and Google's Magenta project. Ever since Turing defined his test, popular culture has fixated on the idea of sentient AI, both benign and catastrophically malign. But AI today has become something of a catch-all term for software that augments human intelligence, usually by mining vast troves of data.

Some 70 years ago, computer scientist Alan Turing famously set the bar for artificial intelligence: a computer that could convince a human conversation partner that it was a person. On a recent spring afternoon in the Flow Machines laboratory, located on a quiet street in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris, senior researcher Pierre Roy was more concerned with his music-making AI software's ability to create a convincingly catchy song. "So far, from the technical standpoint, no one knows how to do a proper song, to tell a story," he said. Flow Machines, a project of Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Paris that receives funding from the European Research Council, is developing an AI program that can compose compelling, professional-quality music -- an aim shared by similar ventures such as Jukedeck in the UK and Google's Magenta project. Ever since Turing defined his test, popular culture has fixated on the idea of sentient AI, both benign and catastrophically malign.

COMPARED with their human counterparts, today's game-playing computer programs are really quite boring. However skilful they may be, each is only ever good at one game. Take the chess-playing computer Deep Blue, developed by IBM. Although it beat human world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, present it with much simpler games such as checkers or noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) and it wouldn't have a clue where to begin. "Deep Blue can't play checkers at all," says Michael Genesereth, a computer scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.