AI is useless without the fuel of highly detailed personal data

What's going on: If a machine is to act like a human, it must first learn how humans act. For that, it needs countless examples of how people would respond to various situations.

• This process, known as "supervised learning," is how AI systems have become capable of identifying certain problems in medical scans more accurately than human doctors, or of driving a car without human input.
• When you use Amazon's Alexa voice assistant, Facebook's News Feed or Tesla's Autopilot, the companies are watching your every move, and using your behavior to keep training their products.

Who trains AI systems? Sometimes, it's grad students in a research lab; frequently, it's workers on crowdsourcing sites or in cubicles in Malaysia or China, paid mere cents for every new datapoint they create.

• But often, it's you — and you're working for free.

"The data-driven world will be always on, always tracking, always monitoring, always listening and always watching — because it will be always learning."