Autonomous cars, smart homes, virtual assistants and augmented reality are taking over the world, but what are the cultural and social impacts of artificial intelligence?
That's what Microsoft's vice president David Heiner will attempt to answer when he addresses a Melbourne conference on Thursday about the ethics of these new technologies.
Mr Heiner earlier in 2017 said Microsoft is a big believer in the benefits artificial intelligence will bring, but like "any other new profound technology, it raises societal issues, and that is something we think of carefully".
And the technology continues to get smarter.
Late in 2016, Microsoft announced it had error rates for artificial intelligence on par with, if not better than, human benchmarks - under 5.9 per cent for speech recognition and 3.5 per cent for image recognition.
Mr Heiner is expected to speak about the technical, commercial, ethical and legal dynamics around artificial intelligence.
He joined Microsoft in 1994 and has responsibility for privacy, telecommunications, artificial intelligence, accessibility and online safety.
