By Jeff Desjardins for Visual Capitalist Science fiction didn't do a great job in preparing us for our first real encounters with AI. Most people probably still envision AI in the form of a sentient robot that can talk, move around, and experience feelings – something like WALL-E or C-3PO from the movies. Although that still may be the dream, it turns out that the current iteration of AI is actually quite different. With modern AI, all the "thinking" gets done in the cloud, and the algorithms aren't tied to the identity of a physical machine like we would have expected from the big screen. The modern iteration of AI works silently in the background without a face, and it's starting to impact everything it touches. It's also set to transform our economy at warp speed.