If you've ever lamented that everything you hear on the radio today sounds like it was written by a machine, brace yourself for the future: The robots are coming. But artificial intelligence is already being employed to write music, and Los Angeles-based musician and YouTube video star Taryn Southern is getting in on the ground floor by recording the first album composed entirely using AI, which should leave her well placed for sympathy when the robots eventually take over -- assuming, of course, that AI is by then sufficiently advanced that robots can actually feel sympathy. Southern hears jokes like that a lot, as you might imagine. But no, she's not worried that AI will eventually render human musicians and composers obsolete. And if the day comes when AI does take over music, she says, we'll all have far bigger worries on our hands.

Of course this is the Watson that was built by IBM to understand answers on Jeopardy and come up with the right questions. Since his appearance on the game show in 2011, IBM has expanded Watson's talents, building on the algorithms that allow him to read and derive meaning from natural language. And among other functions, IBM adapted Watson for use in medicine. Toronto Western, part of the University Health Network, is the first hospital in Canada to use Watson for research in Parkinson's, a neurological disorder. The centre has a track record of running clinical trials for off-label drug use, which means taking a drug approved for treatment of one condition and repurposing it for another.

The government's vision of AI-enabled growth is not rooted in the apocalyptic science fiction of Terminator movies where robots destroy humanity (Arnold Schwarzenegger appropriated the Spanish phrase "Hasta la vista, baby" in Terminator 2: Judgement Day before sparking some spectacular explosions). Instead, Bains and others point to two Canadian "pioneers" in AI -- Geoff Hinton at the University of Toronto and Montreal computer scientist Yoshua Bengio. They are recognized world leaders in "deep learning" or "machine learning" -- advanced algorithms that allow powerful new super computers to essentially think like humans. The minister is also buoyed by signs of foreign capital coming to Canada such as Microsoft's recent acquisition of the artificial intelligence start up, Maluuba, based in Waterloo, Ont., and Montreal. In a recent conversation with Bill Gates, Bains said the Microsoft co-founder acknowledged that Canada was playing "a leadership role" in AI. "We want to encourage those kinds of investments to continue, to connect with each other on a national level," said Bains. "If companies are betting on AI, academic institutions are betting on AI, why can't government be a meaningful partner in this area as well?"

Web retailers have plenty of data on their customers. Some of these online technologies can even track shoppers from site to site to lure them back with what's known as retargeting ads -- promos targeted to what that shopper has looked at before, but didn't actually buy. Smart shelves with sensors promise the same kind of in-depth consumer behaviour analytics at retail stores. At a Kroger store in Cold Spring, Ohio, shelves currently show digitized price tags and information about the products. The next step is to tie that to individual shoppers.