The vaccine rollout, to date, has been anything but orderly. Each state sets its own parameters for eligibility and has to contend with limited supplies or limited storage. Vaccines are lost, go bad, or are administered to people in the wrong order — say, your healthy niece got one before your elderly father.

Facial recognition seems like the stuff of science fiction. Technology that’s capable of identifying a human face from a photograph or video and matching it from among hundreds of millions of other faces stored in a database of faces—if that doesn’t sound futuristic, we don’t know what does.

For years, artificial intelligence technology has been improving and spreading at astronomical rates — and 2021 won’t be an exception. Last year, as so much more of the world moved online in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, AI made great strides to keep up. According to tech publications and other online resources, there are a few AI trends we can expect to see more of this year. We’ve put together a list to help explain how these trends and other key AI advancements will impact our lives in 2021.