Man-machine merge when machines imitate human being and better them in some respects. It is called a state of singularity — a point when machines become smarter than human beings. It results into Artificial General Intelligence or another name for human-level intelligence. It is expected that machines may match human intelligence by 2029.

Even before the advent of computers, a possibility of thinking and decision making by machines was considered in the 17th century. The maxim was, ‘I think and therefore I am.’

Turing is said to be the pioneer of AI who floats the idea of thinking machines. He developed the idea of the Turing Test. It decides whether a computer is capable to think or not. McCarthy coined the term AI to define this ability in 1956.

The first natural language processing computer Eliza was developed in 1966 at MIT’s AI Lab. It was a forerunner of the present day digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa.

In the 1990’s, Lee published how HTTP worked which led to world wide web. We assigned the name Internet to this. Internet ultimately led us to big data, which is fuel for AI.

Deep Blue developed by IBM (1999) defeated Garry Kasparov in chess. Watson a computer engine from IBM overshadowed humans in TV game show Jeopardy! In 2012, computers could recognise cats when trained to do so.

In 2018, we have developed autonomous cars. In 2016, AlphaGo from Deep Mind defeated world Go champion Lee Sodol.

AI is likely to penetrate every commercial sector. Customised products could be developed by using AI in banking and insurance. Crypto tokens can be a medium of exchange. Self aware and self replicating software systems could emerge.