Over the last decade, these advances in the speed of connectivity and the elimination of complexity have grown exponentially. Because as big data got really big, as broadband got really fast, as algorithms got really smart, as 5G got actually deployed, artificial intelligence got really intelligent. So now, with no touch — but just a voice command or machines acting autonomously — we can go so much deeper in so many areas.

Scientists and doctors can now find the needle in the haystack of health data as the norm, not the exception, and therefore see certain disease patterns that were never apparent before. Machines can recognize your face so accurately that the Chinese government can punish you for jaywalking in Beijing, using street cameras, and you will never encounter a police officer.

Indeed, with today’s facial recognition technology, I can dispense with the card reader at my office’s security gate and instead use each employee’s face as an ID. And cars can drive on their own.

DeepMind, the artificial intelligence arm of Google’s parent, developed an A.I. program, AlphaGo, that has now defeated the world’s top human players of the ancient strategy game Go — which is much more complex than chess — by learning from human play.

As The Times reported, DeepMind “showed yet another way that computers could be developed to perform better than humans in highly complex tasks” and to “mimic the way the brain functions.” DeepMind’s next breakthrough, AlphaZero, did not even need to learn from humans. It learned even faster by repeatedly playing against itself!

Today “virtual agents” — using conversational interfaces powered by artificial intelligence — can increasingly understand your intent when you call the bank, credit card company or insurance company for service, just by hearing your voice.

It means machines can answer so many more questions than nonmachines, also known as “humans.” The percentage of calls a chatbot, or virtual agent, is able to handle without turning the caller over to a person is called its “containment rate,” and these rates are steadily soaring. Soon, automated systems will be so humanlike that they will have to self-identify as machines.