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Artificial intelligence has made tremendous strides in recent decades. Voice recognition, automatic language translation, and complex decision-making are just a few of the human-exclusive tasks that can now be done by machines. However, artificial intelligence is still constrained in numerous ways. Even though machines are very good at processing a lot of data and making decisions based on patterns, they still can't compare to how creative and intuitive people are. Scientists and researchers, on the other hand, can come up with novel concepts that alter the world, while artists and writers can produce works of literature and art that are one-of-a-kind and illuminating.

A multi-disciplinary team of researchers from Technische Universität Berlin recently created a neural'network' that could one day surpass human brain power with a single neuron. Our brains have approximately 86 billion neurons. Combined, they make up one of the most advanced organic neural networks known to exist. Current state-of-the-art artificial intelligence systems attempt to emulate the human brain through the creation of multi-layered neural networks designed to cram as many neurons in as little space as possible. Unfortunately, such designs require massive amounts of power and produce outputs that pale in comparison to the robust, energy-efficient human brain. Per an article from The Register's Katyanna Quach, scientists estimate the costs for training just one neural "super network" to exceed that of a nearby space mission: Neural networks, and the amount of hardware needed to train them using huge data sets, are growing in size.

There's a new church for tech-minded folks, and it sounds like something out of a science fiction novel. "Way of the Future" (or WOTF, as they abbreviate it) is Yes, you read that correctly. They want to get a head start on selling out the human race to our machine-overlords-to-be. The church (for lack of a better word) assumes that technology will eventually surpass human capabilities, and turn into an all-knowing, all-seeing being that will resemble--or arguably actually be--a god. And that we need to know who's on the computers' side by keeping track (more on that later).

There is a 50 per cent chance that machines will outperform humans in all tasks within 45 years, according to a survey of more than 350 artificial intelligence researchers. AI will master many activities a lot sooner, though. Machines are predicted to be better than us at translating languages by 2024, writing high-school essays by 2026, driving a truck by 2027, working in retail by 2031, writing a bestselling book by 2049 and surgery by 2053. In fact, all human jobs will be automated within the next 120 years, say respondents. The survey, by the University of Oxford and Yale University, was sent to AI researchers who published in 2015 at one of two big conferences in the field – the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems and the International Conference on Machine Learning. In total, 352 people responded.

Artificial intelligence will likely not reach the level of intelligence that allows it to think like human beings, even if technology now is able to surpass humans in specific tasks, according to a senior Microsoft executive. "Artificial intelligence currently learns in a very controlled, monitored environment, it learns through data [given to it],"Rui Yong, assistant managing director at Microsoft Research Asia, said in an interview with the South China Morning Post. "But that is not how humans learn." While artificial intelligence technology today has surpassed human ability in certain tasks, such as AlphaGo's ability to beat humans in the game of Go or Microsoft's computer vision technology that recognises objects in images more accurately than humans, these technologies are tailored to achieve specific tasks and cannot adapt quickly to new problems. "When humans encounter a new situation, we can adapt and use our imagination to find a solution. But for computers, if they have never encountered a certain problem, then they cannot solve it," he said.