It feels like artificial intelligence crept into our lives almost without us knowing, helping us pick movies on Netflix, our favourite tunes on Spotify and buy things on Amazon. As it gets older and smarter, AI's reach will be staggering, with experts at the 2018 Davos World Economic Forum predicting there's a 50-per-cent chance artificial intelligence will outperform humans in all tasks in 45 years. Consider the ways it's already at work in our lives. There is face recognition to unlock our phones; fraud detection on credit cards; smart homes that call Uber, dim lights and lower the heat; fridges that give us recipes when we pull something out for dinner, and stoves that begin to preheat (because they talk to the fridge). All possible because AI – or "deep learning" technology – sorts and identifies huge swaths of data and connects the dots (or thinks) for us. In Davos, the big thinkers believe that in the next five to 25 years, AI will help teach kids in the classroom (there are already AI teaching assistants at some universities), write a Top 40 pop song and pen a New York Times bestseller.

When David Stinson finished high school, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1977, the first thing he did was get a job building houses. After a few years, though, the business slowed. Stinson was then twenty-four, with two children to support. As he explained over lunch recently, that meant finding a job at one of the two companies in the area that offered secure, blue-collar work. "Either I'll be working at General Motors or I'll be working at Steelcase by the end of the year," he vowed in 1984.