Artificial intelligence (AI) Reality vs. fiction

AI techniques and theories have been around since post-World War II, but in the last several years, the perfect storm of big-data generation, cloud-based storage and processing, and refinement of algorithms and techniques, has come together to create an AI boom.

Doomsayers predict that machines capable of learning will eventually acquire the power to dominate us, but the AI that exists today is limited to well-defined tasks.

Current AI systems are basically prediction machines. Increasingly sophisticated algorithms and machine learning techniques parse reams of data on a particular issue and generate insights, predictions and diagnoses with more efficiency than teams of humans ever could.