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Competition between human and machine has long existed, but until recently only concerning mechanical work, not intellectual. Today, not only is it generally known that technological developments per se always surpass themselves, but "thinking machines" or "artificial intelligence" are consciously being used in areas where, until now, exclusively human skills seemed indispensable, for example in sensitive areas like medicine or psychological diagnosis.
And while some see the human future in the freedom to live out our creative side, as soon as machines take over everything else for us, in a Japanese advertising agency a machine is already part of the creative team and submits its own campaign drafts.
All existing artificial intelligence systems have one thing in common: They work with enormous amounts of data which has been gathered, sorted and entered by humans. But these technologies are learning better and better how to evaluate this data independently and "overnight" for ever more finely tuned processes. This may still be a long way from human thinking with its complex associative and combinatorial abilities - but it is already too close and too much a part of our everyday lives for us not to keep a serious eye on the competition - as scientists from a wide range of disciplines have long been doing.
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