Are AI and “deep learning” the future of, well, everything?

You might not know it, but machine learning already plays a part in your everyday life. When you speak to your phone (via Cortana, Siri or Google Now) and it fetches information, or you type in the Google search box and it predicts what you are looking for before you finish, you are doing something that has only been made possible by machine learning. However, this is just the beginning: with companies such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook spending millions on research into advanced neural networks and deep machine learning, computers are set to get smarter still. But deep learning isn't about self-aware machines taking over the world. This is a story about how ingenious algorithms and code are giving computers the ability to do things we never previously thought possible.