Then, on the basis of a positive future that you like the look of, your brain works to adapt reality to match it: you do what needs to be done in order to end up in that rewarding position you imagined. Everyone in the space of artificial intelligence has known for a long, long time that the gap between where we are and human level intelligence is somewhat vaster than one might be forgiven for believing… they just don't go to any particular effort to highlight it as it could, well, turn down the money taps. Being so far from human level intelligence doesn't mean that AI (and particularly the field of machine learning) has not enhanced our lives, because it has. It is revolutionising the way we interact with machines, enabling automation that we couldn't have dreamed of just a few years ago and is making great strides into areas like medical research, drug discovery, disease prevention and treatment that are hard to ignore. But we should separate the component parts in this field that deliver real things from the dream of what researchers call "artificial general intelligence" (AGI): digital what-if machines that can, amongst other things, generalise their knowledge to adapt to new situations, imagine the rewards of future options to make wiser decisions now and have a sense of "self" that would allow us to treat them as some form of intellectual equal. To stick to current deep learning techniques and their artificial neural networks on the basis that "we'll get there, folks" is naive and no serious research into general intelligence is doing so.

As computers have become more sophisticated, researchers have increasingly asked whether or not machines have the capability for creativity. Can we use machines for certain, or all, aspects of the creative process (and hopefully learn something about human creativity in the process)? This is the field of computational creativity, a fascinating interdisciplinary discipline. For example, IBM has been using the technology of Watson (of Jeopardy! Through analyzing "the chemical compounds and ingredients, food professionals can identify new recipes and pairings that are not only tasty and healthy, but also efficient to produce."