The Dawn of Artificial Intelligence

Throughout history, mankind has refused to accept the complacency of the status quo and has instead looked to harness creativity and imagination to reshape the world through innovation and disruption. The Industrial Revolution, Henry Ford's moving assembly line, the invention of flight and commercial aviation, and, more recently, the creation of the Internet have all acted as disruptive forces that have not only changed the way we live, but have been engines for commerce that have offered consumers enormous freedom. We're on the verge of a new technological revolution, thanks to the rapid advances in processing power, the rise of big data, cloud computing, mobility due to wireless capability, and advanced algorithms. Many believe that there may not be a single technology that will shape our world more in the next 50 years than artificial intelligence. Some have observed that, as powerful and transformative as the Internet has been, it may be best remembered as the predicate for artificial intelligence and machine learning. Artificial intelligence is at an inflection point. While the concept of artificial intelligence has been around for at least 60 years, more recent breakthroughs, such as IBM's chess-playing Deep Blue victory over world champion Gary Kasparov, advancements in speech recognition, the emergence of self-driving cars, and IBM's computer Watson's victory in the TV game show Jeopardy have brought artificial intelligence from mere concept to reality.