Flex it: Researchers at MIT have created a robot that closely monitors your biceps as you lift and move things around. The idea is to develop a system capable of collaborating with people more effectively.

For the first 54 years of his life, Dennis DeGray was an active guy. In 2007 he was living in Pacific Grove, Calif., not far from the ocean and working at a beachside restaurant. Then, while taking out the trash one rainy night, he slipped, fell, and hit his chin on the pavement, snapping his neck between the second and third vertebrae. DeGray was instantly rendered, as he puts it, "completely nonfunctional from the collarbone south." He's since depended on caregivers to feed, clothe, and clean him and meet most any other need.

ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) has already changed some activities, including parts of finance like fraud prevention, but not yet fund management and stock-picking. That seems odd: machine learning, a subset of AI that excels at finding patterns and making predictions using reams of data, looks like an ideal tool for the business. In San Francisco, however, where machine learning is so much part of the furniture the term features unexplained on roadside billboards, a cluster of upstart hedge funds has sprung up in order to exploit these techniques. These new hedgies are modest enough to concede some of their competitors' points. Left to their own devices, machine-learning techniques are prone to "overfit", ie, to finding peculiar patterns in the data.

IN 2016 Lee Sedol, one of the world's best players of Go, lost a match in Seoul to a computer program called AlphaGo by four games to one. It was a big event, both in the history of Go and in the history of artificial intelligence (AI). Go occupies roughly the same place in the culture of China, Korea and Japan as chess does in the West. After its victory over Mr Lee, AlphaGo beat dozens of renowned human players in a series of anonymous games played online, before re-emerging in May to face Ke Jie, the game's best player, in Wuzhen, China. Mr Ke fared no better than Mr Lee, losing to the computer 3-0.

Machine learning (ML) is in for a big year in 2018, if new research from consulting firm Deloitte is correct. One of the major predictions of the firm's 2018 Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) report released this week is that enterprises will likely double their use of ML technology by the end of 2018. "We have reached the tipping point where adoption of machine learning in the enterprise is poised to accelerate, and will drive improved business operations, better decision making and provide enhanced or entirely new products and services," said Paul Sallomi, vice chairman of Deloitte. ML, a core element of artificial intelligence, will progress "at a phenomenal pace," according to the study. "As impressive as it is today, in 50 years' time the ML abilities of 2018 will be considered baby steps in the history of this technology," the report said.

China's biggest online commerce company is making big strides in the field of artificial intelligence. The Alibaba Group has developed a machine-learning model which scored higher than human users on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset.

IN A MOVE that could shift the course of multiple technology markets, Google will soon launch a cloud computing service that provides exclusive access to a new kind of artificial-intelligence chip designed by its own engineers. CEO Sundar Pichai revealed the new chip and service during his keynote at Google I/O, the company's annual developer conference. This new processor is a unique creation designed to both train and execute deep neural networks--machine learning systems behind the rapid evolution of everything from image and speech recognitionto automated translation to robotics. Google says it will not sell the chip directly to others. Instead, through its new cloud service, any business or developer can build and operate software via the internet that taps into hundreds and perhaps thousands of these processors, all packed into Google data centers.

Artificially intelligent nano-machines will be injected into humans within 20 years to repair and enhance muscles, cells and bone, a senior inventor at IBM has forecast. John McNamara, who works at IBM Hursley Innovation Centre, in Hampshire, submitted evidence to the House of Lords Artificial Intelligence Committee. Mr McNamara said that within just two decades, technology may have advanced so much that humans and machines are effectively'melded' together, allowing for huge leaps forward in human consciousness and cognition. "We may see AI nano-machines being injected into our bodies," he told Peers. "These will provide huge medical benefits, such as being able to repair damage to cells, muscles and bones – perhaps even augment them.

LEADING ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE RESEARCHERS gathered recently for the prestigious Neural Information Processing Systems conference have a new topic on their agenda. The issue was crystallized in a keynote from Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford. The conference, which drew nearly 8,000 researchers to Long Beach, California, is deeply technical, swirling in dense clouds of math and algorithms. Crawford's good-humored talk featured no equations and took the form of an ethical wake-up call. She urged attendees to start considering, and finding ways to mitigate, accidental or intentional harms caused by their creations.

Machine learning already plays a big part in your everyday life, and its role is only going to grow. Google searches and muttered requests to Amazon's Alexa may tap into a veiled world of clever algorithms, but these techniques teeter on something much larger: a world of self-developing artificial intelligence. Deep learning, and the neural networks that do the thinking, is becoming an integral seam to digital technology. By extension, artificial intelligence is having a growing effect on our experience of the world and, as an artist, it is a material that can't be ignored. That is the thinking of Anna Ridler, who is building a name for herself with works that hoist machine-learning techniques into the gallery.