Rise of the machines

"Firms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Baidu have got into an AI arms race ... not so much making new sorts of minds as it is removing some of the need for the old sort... deep learning ... is a general-purpose pattern-recognition technique ... any activity which has access to large amounts of data—from running an insurance business to research into genetics—might find it useful... Machine translation, too, will be improved by deep learning... And those different sorts of AI can be linked together to form an even more capable system... The worry that AI could do to white-collar jobs what steam power did to blue-collar ones during the Industrial Revolution is therefore worth taking seriously... the Oxford Martin School ... concluding that up to half of the job categories tracked by American statisticians might be vulnerable. AI is ... simply the latest in a long line of cognitive enhancements ... like paper, which provides a portable, reliable memory, or the abacus, which aids mental arithmetic. the best advice is to ignore the threat of computers taking over the world—and check that they are not going to take over your job first." - Rise of the machines | The Economist