After all, Artificial Intelligence too is software that examins confusing situations to venture a guess, and learn from what happens when there is action. The line between ordinary software and AI software has blurred and cloud computing has made AI available to both big and small companies.

The earlyy progress in the 1950s was the invention of neural networks. These networks are the software which processes data with some pattern recognition capabilities of the human brains. A refined programme called a perception came later. It would create a talking, walking and thinking machine. In the early years of this millennium, research labs at companies such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook took root. They had large amount of data and computing power. They hired capable manpower to do speech recognition and image analysis.

Will AI benefit only the cabitalists? Anything that cuts labour costs does so. Another issue — if huge data and computing power drives AI, would future economy be controlled by a handful of companies?