Deep learning basically tries to make machine recognise patterns following the way our brains does. Google’s Street View makes use of deep learning to make its machines “view” addresses. Apple’s Siri uses it too.  

But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just “neural nets” for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain. “There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods,” said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. “The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed.”

Maybe the world of automated robots doing human activities is not so far away now.