Its called deep learning, machine learning you can get machines - bots to do pretty much anything now. Before you had to program all variables into your code ie all the possible things your robot - bot could do. Now you just tell it the final outcome.

Lets say you wanted a bot that predicts future football results. Now you just tell your bot to predict the result and tell it where to start look for data to help it get there. It will then start scanning the web and pulling out all relevant data such as who's in the team, what's the weather report for that day, who's the opponent, what was all previous results, whether its a home, away game, are any players injured etc. It will then make its prediction and after the match it will check its results.

If your bot gets it correct it analyses the result and sees how it got it correct.

If it gets it wrong it then analyses the result and starts working out why it got it wrong, how it can improve its next prediction and so on.

These are great for programers as you can use them to help predict things like Stock markets.

Other types of aplications: traffic flows, traffic lights knowing the optimal amount of time to keep a light red or green down to the milisecond

BAD APPS : POLICE PRE PREDICTING CRIME or what the class as crime lol

anything that leaves data can all be fed into a single database,
This has already been going on for years - trust me im a programmer
Its going to be bleak times ahead