'City should help lead the way to Al future'

Minister takes tour of uni tech centre

- JOSEPH TIMAN

CLIMATE change and poverty - these are the kind of global problems artificial intelligence (AI) could help fix, according to a government minister.

And visiting Manchester, he said the city should be at the forefront of this fight.

From virtual assistants such as Siri on our mobile phones to X-ray analysis in the NHS, we are using AI every day without even realising it. But in its most basic form, machine learning is nothing new in fact, the first successful AI programme which ran on a computer in Manchester was written in 1951.

There have been warnings about the speed at which machines are learning, but there are no signs that the rate of advance will slow down any time soon.