The Telegraph My details My newsletters Logout Upgrade to Premium My details My newsletters Logout The Telegraph Will Apple have to sacrifice your privacy to keep its edge?
 16 June 2016 • 7:21pm while taking steps in AI this week Credit: AFP The defining advance of the next decade, if you listen to the prophets of Silicon Valley, will be the seismic and unavoidable ascent of artificial intelligence.
 It might be hard to take the thought seriously when a satnav sends you down a dead-end country road, or your phone’s autocorrect feature turns a carefully-constructed text message to gibberish, but the milestones reached in the last year alone have been exceptional.
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 Amazon has emerged as a sleeping giant in the field.
 And Microsoft is ploughing resources into artificial intelligence, albeit with mixed success (a conversational Twitter bot it unveiled earlier this year was swiftly shut down after “learning” to spew vile insults at those who engaged with it).
 Google's driverless cars Google's driverless cars - one advance in AI Credit: AFP The missing name here is Apple.
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 But another reason, and one that is often brushed aside by other tech groups invested in AI, is privacy.
 Artificial intelligence, at least for now, needs to be trained on heaps of data.
 A computer vision programme does not instinctively know what a cat is – it must be shown millions of photos of cats to be able to identify one, and even then, tends to recognise cat characteristics – four legs, tail – rather than the understanding a human will have (show it a cat with three legs and it might struggle).