The defining advance of the next decade, if you listen to the prophets of Silicon Valley, will be the seismic and unavoidable ascent of artificial intelligence.

It might be hard to take the thought seriously when a satnav sends you down a dead-end country road, or your phone’s autocorrect feature turns a carefully-constructed text message to gibberish, but the milestones reached in the last year alone have been exceptional.

DeepMind, the British AI company owned by Google, has defeated the world champion at Go, the ancient game that requires a finely-tuned sense of intuition to master. Driverless cars now seem like an inevitability rather than a curiosity. Error rates on image recognition technology have dropped from 25pc in 2011 to less than 4pc.

AI is graduating from theory and academic papers to everyday life. If the last 10 years has been defined by the plummeting costs of microprocessors and sensors that have made smartphones a commodity product, the future is about building intelligent systems that can make them more powerful.

Ergo, the companies that will profit might not be the ones with expertise in hardware design, but those who can build software that talks back.

Google, always a company defined by the effectiveness of its algorithms over others, has gone 'all in’ on deep learning, and has incorporated it into thousands of software projects.