With no surprise, Artificial intelligence and Machine learning are the most frequently heard words in tech industry right now. Artificial intelligence is revolutionary as of the nature of big life impacting events like the advent of personal computer, the Internet, the .com boom, and so on. In addition to that, this fascinating field has got life from deep down with in itself. May be because it is more like modeling a human being with his great complications of thinking, emotions, logic, commonsense and every thing else. And it has the power to crawl in to every part of our lives. Companies are fighting to foster AI’s advantages to their customers as soon and as much as possible.

Giants like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM are fighting to solve the next big problem in AI and to become dear to the entire world. So they are building research labs and diverting streams of money for the research in AI&ML. Academic institutions are always crazy of anything that can change the course of the humanity so they too are rushing towards AI research. AI is hot for startups, then so for the Venture capitalists, seed and angel investors and so on. It helps Medicine, Economics, Humanities, Business, Teaching, Bio-informatics, and almost every thing we will see in every day life in one way or the other. So, what can people talk about more than Artificial intelligence and Machine learning.

The hype of AI&ML is to do with the fact that it is smart and can replace several hours of human work in to some lines of code and computation. And the scope of AI is unbound-able as it has its role in every thing human can do and can’t do, loosely speaking. But why now?

What made AI to come to senses of a common man and blow his mind in just decade or less?

What made AI to be the turning point of humanity as we now know?

Lets answer the first question. To make a computer learn as we do, we need a lot of data and computation. Digitalization of information has begun prior relatively but the required computation capabilities are not available until the last decade or so. When we got computation at cheap we started crunching big data to learn from that. Neural network models, deep learning techniques and other techniques to teach a machine got the most out of the big data and computation power combined.We had new way to predict, recommend, deliver customized services, and so on. As the scope of AI is just unbound-able, it took off to a new heights as never imagined. So the time for the humanity to take a really revolutionary turn turned out to be now.

To answer the second question, its justifiable to go back to the time where we wrote a first program and taught a machine to do something. May be there should be some sort of magic in teaching something to do something. We represented knowledge and gave it to a machine. That’s it. We made ourselves partially. The more we represent knowledge the more we can teach the machine, the more we ask the right questions the more we can make it smart. Maybe we can teach everything to a machine and make it one of us. Maybe we create ourselves as a machine. Maybe we create ourselves in more copies and watch them interact with each other. Maybe they find us slow and wipe us all out for extinction or can we be really extinct, actually us being in them.

Nonetheless, AI has got life as we have, and so, surely is the turning point of humanity.