It's a good sign for the robotics industry that more and more robotics companies are starting to make major announcements at specialized events and trade shows, indicating that their robots are ready for tough, real-world applications. This week at ProMat, "the premier showcase of material handling, supply chain, and logistics solutions," Fetch Robotics is showing off two very new, and very large, stuff-transporting robots. This video shows the Freight 500, which can handle 500 kilograms of payload, or generally something about the size of a "case," which I guess is a standard unit in the area of "material handling, supply chain, and logistics solutions." The Freight 1500 weighs just under 470 kg all by itself, but it's only 35.5 centimeters (14 inches) tall, which is the same height as its smaller siblings. It has lidar sensors front and back, a forward-looking RGBD camera, and can run for up to 9 hours while recharging itself to 90 percent in just an hour.

If you're betting on Silicon Valley stars like Google, Tesla, and Uber to free you from your horrorshow commute with autonomous driving technology, don't. That's the key takeaway from a new report that finds Ford--yes, the Detroit-based, 113-year-old giant--is winning the race to build the self-driving car, with General Motors running a close second. Meanwhile, Waymo--aka Google's driverless car effort--sits in sixth place, with Tesla in twelfth. Uber languishes in sixteenth, behind Honda and barely ahead of startup Nutonomy and China's Baidu. That may sound all kinds of wrong to anyone who has seen Uber, Waymo, and Tesla flaunt their tech, and regards Detroit's old guard as ill-prepared for the robotic future.

"Does the world really need another wedding photographer?" That was the thought that ran through Saskia Nelson's mind when, having spontaneously resigned from her office job at a London Olympics legacy project, she was thinking of her next move. An amateur photographer, she decided four years ago, aged 43, that she was going to go professional. But she hadn't really worked out how, and so she used her three-month notice period to consider her options, one of which was to join the army of wedding snappers. "But I thought, 'I'm not married, it's not my bag, I don't really know anything about it,'" says Saskia.

A new global study finds several new categories of human jobs emerging, requiring skills and training that will take many companies by surprise. The threat that automation will eliminate a broad swath of jobs, across the world economy is now well established. As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become ever more sophisticated, another wave of job displacement will almost certainly occur. But here's what we've been overlooking: Many new jobs will also be created -- jobs that look nothing like those that exist today. In Accenture's global study of more than 1,000 large companies already using or testing AI and machine-learning systems, we identified the emergence of entire categories of new, uniquely human jobs.

Things change pretty much on a daily basis in the world of SEO. Since the announcement of Google's AI machine learning algorithm – RankBrain – in 2015, one of the most discussed topics in SEO galleries is: With Google admitting RankBrain being one of the top three ranking factors, these discussions have become even more worthwhile. In past 3-4 months, we also saw a spike in the number of SERPed members asking the same question. And, multiple posts claiming 2017 as the year of AI and Voice Search, we think it is the right time to dive deeper to understand more about it. To get more clarity on this topic, we decided to go straight to the big guns and find out what they think about it. The responses from each expert are compiled below. Fasten your seat belts and get ready for an awesome ride. Albert Mora is the CEO and co-founder of Seolution, an SEO agency for Shopify e-commerce sites. He has been doing SEO from 1997 and has around 20 years of experience. Follow Albert on Twitter here. Since the beginning of the Internet, artificial intelligence has played a relevant role in the operation of search engines. Logically, the algorithms have been evolving, but the fundamental underlying principle remains the same: search engines want to deliver quality search results to the users. For this reason, if you want a long term sustainable SEO results, you must think about the users first, not about the search engines. Alex has more than 15 years of experience in Digital Marketing, and he is working online since 2002.

With great power comes great responsibility--and artificial-intelligence technology is getting much more powerful. Companies in the vanguard of developing and deploying machine learning and AI are now starting to talk openly about ethical challenges raised by their increasingly smart creations. "We're here at an inflection point for AI," said Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft Research, at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference this week. "We have an ethical imperative to harness AI to protect and preserve over time." Horvitz spoke alongside researchers from IBM and Google pondering similar issues.

Machine learning couldn't be hotter. A type of artificial intelligence that enables computers to learn to perform tasks and make predictions without explicit programming, machine learning has caught fire among the hip tech set, but remains a somewhat futuristic concept for most enterprises. But thanks to technological advances and emerging frameworks, machine learning may soon hit the mainstream. Consulting firm Deloitte expects to see a big increase in the use and adoption of machine learning in the coming year. This is in large part because the technology is becoming much more pervasive.

America's manufacturing heyday is gone, and so are millions of jobs, lost to modernization. Despite what Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin might think, the National Bureau of Economic Research and Silicon Valley executives, among many others, know it's already happening. And a new report from PwC estimates that 38% of American jobs are at "high risk" of being replaced by technology within the next 15 years. But how soon automation will replace workers isn't the real problem. The real threat to American jobs will come if China does it first.

Bots are popping up everywhere from Facebook to home personal assistants. Advances in natural language processing, machine learning and other AI technology created the foundation for bots, but the field has a long way to go before it reaches its full potential. The Alexas and Cortanas of the world do an effective job at accomplishing requested tasks as long as people present them one at a time. A multi-threaded version of these digital personal assistants would allow them to remember multiple situations. This use case is closer to how people actually want to engage with the bots.

With great power comes great responsibility--and artificial-intelligence technology is getting much more powerful. Companies in the vanguard of developing and deploying machine learning and AI are now starting to talk openly about ethical challenges raised by their increasingly smart creations. "We're here at an inflection point for AI," said Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft Research, at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference this week. "We have an ethical imperative to harness AI to protect and preserve over time." Horvitz spoke alongside researchers from IBM and Google pondering similar issues.