For a while now, those who track robotics development have taken note of a quiet revolution in the sector. While self-driving cars have grabbed all the headlines, the work happening at the intersection of AI, machine vision, and machine learning is fast becoming the foundation for the next phase of robotics. By combining machine vision with learning capabilities, roboticists are opening a wide range of new possibilities like vision-based drones, robotic harvesting, robotic sorting in recycling, and warehouse pick and place. We're finally at the inflection point: The moment where these applications are becoming good enough to provide real value in semi-structured environments where traditional robots could never succeed. To discuss this exciting moment and how it's going to change the world we live in fundamentally, I connected with Pieter Abbeel, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also the director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and co-director of the Berkeley AI Research lab.

The future is always coming and yet it never quite seems to get here. Once upon a time, we were promised jetpacks. Likewise with those robot assistants that were meant to relieve 1950s housewives from the drudgery of cleaning. And then we have AI, which only started generating a buzz recently, but since then that swell of anticipation has dissipated somewhat. Is it destined to go the way of the jetpack and the robot home help or is it an actual thing that's going to make a profound difference to the way you approach marketing and to every other domain that AI threatens to disrupt?

There will be a lot of people who will click on this article, look at the title and think I live under a rock. AI seems to be everywhere in the news lately, from the massive data crunchers employed by Facebook and Google to find out what cereal you're eating to the scary facial recognition systems that could transform the way we think about crime prevention (for better or worse). There's so much attention on the big flashy developments that no focus is being made on the projects that are actually making a big, tangible difference in people's lives now. I'm reminded of a Vox article I read a year ago. It was about a Twitter user who made an account titled: 'on Mice,' and sought to debunk every sensational healthcare development by pointing out that the authors of the clickbait news were omitting a major feature of their revolutionary new procedure or medicine: that they weren't actually tested on humans, they were tested on mice.

Chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming business essentials. If utilised correctly, the continent will be able to benefit from the wealth of data its citizens generate on a daily basis. You recently participated on a panel titled Entrepreneurial Perspectives on Emerging Technologies in the Field of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems in Switzerland. With the power of big data, companies in Africa are looking for opportunities to provide more personalised customer experiences, improve core business processes and spark innovation through the use of AI. Businesses use chatbots to collect meaningful data through conversation.

The future is always coming and yet it never quite seems to get here. Once upon a time, we were promised jetpacks. Likewise with those robot assistants that were meant to relieve 1950s housewives from the drudgery of cleaning. And then we have AI, which only started generating a buzz recently, but since then that swell of anticipation has dissipated somewhat. Is it destined to go the way of the jetpack and the robot home help or is it an actual thing that's going to make a profound difference to the way you approach marketing and to every other domain that AI threatens to disrupt?

The future is always coming and yet it never quite seems to get here. Once upon a time, we were promised jetpacks. Likewise with those robot assistants that were meant to relieve 1950s housewives from the drudgery of cleaning. And then we have AI, which only started generating a buzz recently, but since then that swell of anticipation has dissipated somewhat. Is it destined to go the way of the jetpack and the robot home help or is it an actual thing that's going to make a profound difference to the way you approach marketing and to every other domain that AI threatens to disrupt?

First of all, I want to highlight something that seems to go missing in the current hype. There is a lot more to machine learning than deep convolutional neural nets and recurrent nets. I don't want to diminish the contribution of those methods, there have been some really cool breakthroughs in these domains. However, they rely on very large data and massive computational capabilities. However, many problems involve less data and even when there is large data it can be the case that the computational demands of conv-nets and recurrent networks are too high (just like they were 20 years ago when these methods were first proposed!).