It’s your nighttime routine: You drop your phone onto the nightstand charging pad, and it asks about your day. You tell it, talking to the virtual personal assistant just like you’d talk to a friend.

(Article by Stephen Shankland)

And why not? Your phone’s artificial intelligence knows you almost as well as you know yourself (maybe even better). So when it suggests ways to get through tomorrow’s calendar, you trust its advice.

Get ready, people: It’s not that far off.

AI is practically everywhere, and getting smarter all the time. Tomorrow’s computers could find new treatments for cancer, compose a symphony and drive your child to school.

Since the first AI research effort 60 years ago at a Dartmouth College conference, humanity has been heading toward computer-based systems that can eventually learn and adapt for themselves. Engineers at universities, startups and the world’s biggest tech companies are linking powerful computers to create neural networks — similar to the wiring of the human brain — and putting them to work digesting and understanding vast stores of data.

Such neural nets can already recognize your face in photos, spot fraud, understand human speech,recommend songs and suggest replies to email. Google’s Project Magenta composes music, an early example of machine-created creativity. Comma.ai is using patterns learned from real-world drivers toteach its AI technology to drive for us. The company hopes to sell the technology by year’s end.

Those are big steps on the way to the end game: creating machines that can think abstractly and adapt on the fly. Just like us.

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and IBM all have AI projects in the works. Google alone has more than 100 teams focused on AI. The company reportedly spent more than $400 million in 2014 to acquire DeepMind, a machine-learning startup. DeepMind’s AlphaGo project caused a stir earlier this year when it beat a human champion at Go, considered the world’s most difficult strategy game.

In a few years, companies will spend billions of dollars annually on AI, Forrester analyst Diego Lo Giudice predicts.

Read more at: cnet.com