<p>The Accelerating Growth of Intelligence in Machines Could Make Them a New &ldquo;Life Form&rdquo; by 2040. Can Man Evolve and Adapt Himself to Co-exist With This New &ldquo;Species&rdquo;? Or Are We Heading Towards a Terrible Dystopia?</p>

- Prithwis Mukerjee

FIRST WE HAD computers, then we had the world wide web and now we are talking about IOT, the Internet of Things. Computers are now pervasive and have occupied every nook and corner of life. Artificial intelligence seems to be growing bigger, faster and smarter every day. Science fiction writers have often spoken of machines taking over the world but is that pure fantasy or is it a matter of time before this fiction becomes fact? In this article, we will explore the genesis of artificial intelligence, examine how fast these are mutating and morphing into more advanced levels and finally speculate on what this means in terms of employment and other key indices of human society. But first, let us see...

HOW MACHINES LEARN

When I was a member of the faculty at IIT Kharagpur, one of my senior colleagues had told me that we should not try to teach students, but instead, help them learn. Can this idea be extended to machines?

Any spreadsheet user would know how to have a computer add two numbers. Why just add? You could do many other tasks like finding percentages or net present values as well. Obviously someone has written a computer program that does all this! Those who know computer programming would also know that writing the code to add two numbers is quite easy. Depending on the level at which you would like to describe the process, the program can be written in a high level language like Python or Java, with just one line of code. But if one uses a low level language like Assembler or binary code, then he will need a l