An Uber self-driving test car which killed a woman crossing the street detected her but decided not to react immediately, a report has said. The car was travelling at 40mph (64km/h) in self-driving mode when it collided with 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg at about 10pm on 18 March. Herzberg was pushing a bicycle across the road outside of a crossing. She later died from her injuries. Although the car's sensors detected Herzberg, its software which decides how it should react was tuned too far in favour of ignoring objects in its path which might be "false positives" (such as plastic bags), according to a report from the Information.

The Amazon Echo with Alexa is great, but it can act a little funny sometimes. These are Ranker's best stories involving Alexa. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. The Amazon Echo with Alexa is great, but it can act a little funny sometimes.

Science fiction has long been criticised for its lack of racial diversity and inclusion. It's rare to see a lead character who isn't white. One study of the top 100 highest-grossing films in the US showed that just eight of those 100 movies had a non-white protagonist, as of 2014. Six of those eight were Will Smith, according to diversity-focused book publisher Lee and Low Books. The long-term exclusion of people of colour from science fiction offers up an interesting paradox.

The safety of self-driving technology has come under recent scrutiny. A pedestrian in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe died in March after she was struck by a self-driving Uber vehicle. It was the first death involving a fully autonomous vehicle.

BOSTON – Robots can't yet bake a souffle or fold a burrito, but they can cook up vegetables and grains and spout them into a bowl -- and are doing just that at a new fast casual restaurant in Boston. Seven autonomously swirling cooking pots -- what the restaurant calls a "never-before-seen robotic kitchen" -- hum behind the counter at Spyce, which opened Thursday in the city's downtown. Push a touch-screen menu to purchase a $7.50 meal called "Hearth." A blend of Brussels sprouts, quinoa, kale and sweet potatoes tumbles from hoppers and into one of the pots. The pot heats the food using magnetic induction, then tips to dunk the cooked meal into a bowl.

While AI has made waves in diagnosing certain diseases better than doctors, there's another area where the tech is being applied that might eventually have even greater impacts on health. Today, at least 18 pharmaceutical companies and more than 75 startups are applying machine learning to drug discovery--the complex, expensive process of identifying and testing new drug compounds. These companies are betting hundreds of millions of dollars that AI will reduce costs, shorten timelines, and lead to new and better drugs. At the Forum on Monday, Exscientia founder and CEO Andrew Hopkins, formerly a professor at the University of Dundee in Scotland and a 10-year veteran of Pfizer, spoke about how AI can lead to improvements in drug development. Exscientia, formed in 2012, uses AI-driven systems to automate drug design while still "mimicking human creativity," says Hopkins.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is undergoing a period of massive expansion. This is not because computers have achieved human-like consciousness, but because of advances in machine learning, where computers learn from huge databases how to classify new data. At the cutting edge are the neural networks that have learned to recognise human faces or play Go. Recognising patterns in data can also be used as a predictive tool. AI is being applied to echocardiograms to predict heart disease, to workplace data to predict if employees are going to leave, and to social media feeds to detect signs of incipient depression or suicidal tendencies.

AI is helping businesses understand "what will happen in the future and how they can stay ahead," says Oracle NetSuite EVP Jim McGeever. He now runs his own firm, Evans Strategic Communications LLC.) CLOUD WARS -- A few months after upgrading its huge portfolio of SaaS apps with "adaptive intelligence" capabilities for the digital economy, Oracle is doing the same for its entire NetSuite family of integrated applications aimed at small and mid-sized businesses. The NetSuite announcement means that while Oracle is still well behind SaaS leader Salesforce.com in revenue, Oracle now offers not only the broadest set of SaaS apps on the market--a truly end-to-end integrated portfolio--but also has the largest family of AI- and machine-learning-enhanced applications suitable for customers ranging in size from the world's largest corporations down to small businesses. The impact will be significant because in cloud ERP alone, NetSuite has 40,000 organizations--standalone companies as well as subsidiaries of big corporations--running its products across 160 countries. And when this NetSuite AI initiative is paired up with the significant commitment Oracle's making to ensure that AI and machine learning are fully infused into all of its IP rather than being a separate application, it's clear that Oracle wants to ensure there is zero daylight between today's AI phenomenon and the company's extensive cloud product lineup--including NetSuite.

TickTock has run out of time. Don't fret if you don't know what that is--after all, the startup launched just a year ago. After TickTock's collapse, though, co-founder and ex-Googler Ryan Hickman is talking candidly about what it's like to build an unwanted robot. Well, a robot unwanted at least by venture capitalists--some 200 investors that TickTock tried to convince to cough up cash before the startup closed down. But with the demise of TickTock come valuable insights into the robotic home of the future, and which companies will end up conquering it.