10 Ways Robots Will Change All Our Lives Forever

This might seem like some kind of futuristic James Bond  style gadget - a sexy secretary bot with pointy metal norks, perhaps - but the reality is that you've probably already got the beginnings of your own robotic personal assistant in your pocket right now.

With the advent of artificial intelligence, machines are no longer mindless calculators that have to wait for your very specific instructions; nowadays, our machines are able to learn, act independently and even pre-empt what you want from them.

Google are the big dogs when it comes to bringing this service to the masses, with ever increasing levels of sophistication in the mind of Google devices. Even a mid-range smartphone these days can figure out where you work, how you travel there and how long it will take you - in real time - without you ever asking it to; You can ask it out loud to tell you your engagements for the day and it will read them out to you; If you Google a restaurant, a couple of hours later a card might pop up giving you the option to book a table with one tap of a button.

Sounds an awful lot like a personal assistant to us.

And this is just low level, £200 smartphone stuff. Right now, a veritable horde of researchers are pouring their efforts into making the minds of machines ever more indistinguishable from our own. The Google Brain Project that was launched in 2011 is a deep learning project with the aim of creating ever more intelligent and, most importantly, useful AI that is able to draw on the almost infinite hive mind of the internet and become truly adaptive, intelligent and (almost) human.