Wherever artificial intelligence is deployed, you will find it has failed in some amusing way. Take the strange errors made by translation algorithms that confuse having someone for dinner with, well, having someone for dinner. But as AI is used in ever more critical situations, such as driving autonomous cars, making medical diagnoses, or drawing life-or-death conclusions from intelligence information, these failures will no longer be a laughing matter. That's why DARPA, the research arm of the US military, is addressing AI's most basic flaw: it has zero common sense. "Common sense is the dark matter of artificial intelligence," says Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, a research nonprofit based in Seattle that is exploring the limits of the technology.

In recognition of the fact that their obituary pages had been dominated by white men, in 2018 the New York Times published an obituary of the Countess Ada Lovelace. Alongside Grace Hopper and Katherine Johnson, Lovelace has become an icon for women in technology. So much so that the second Tuesday in October is recognised internationally as Ada Lovelace Day. Lovelace was from a wealthy background; her father was the poet Lord Byron and her mother, Anne Isabella Milbanke, the "princess of parallelograms", was a keen mathematician and social reformer. Social scientists of today would describe Lovelace as having high "science capital" – her well-connected parents meant her mentors and advisers were members of the British scientific elite, including the polymaths Mary Somerville and Charles Babbage.

Data center-hosted artificial intelligence is rapidly proliferating in both government and commercial markets, and while it's an exciting time for AI, only a narrow set of applications is being addressed, primarily limited to neural networks based on convolutional approach. Other categories of AI include general AI, symbolic AI and bio-AI, and all three require different processing demands and run distinctly different algorithms. Virtually all of today's commercial AI systems run neural network applications. But much more control-intensive and powerful AI workloads using symbolic AI, bio-AI and general AI algorithms are ill-suited to GPU/TPU architectures. Today, commercial and governmental entities that need AI solutions are using workarounds to achieve more compute power for their neural net applications, and chief among them is specialty processors like Google TPUs and NVIDIA GPUs, provisioned in data centers specifically for AI workloads. However, using TPUs and GPUs, even if they are dedicated to AI processing tasks, can still be problematic.

Self-driving car spinoff Waymo says the technology behind its new autonomous vehicles is safe. Waymo's CEO says they will buy up to 20,000 electric vehicles from Jaguar Land Rover to help realize their vision for a robotic ride-hailing service. SAN FRANCISCO -- Later this year, Alphabet's self-driving car company, Waymo, plans an historic first: offering a self-driving, ride-hailing fleet to the general public in the city of Phoenix. After nearly a decade of building and testing its autonomous cars -- which just hit the 10 million-mile milestone -- the former Google Car Project is about to hit start on what eventually will be self-driving car services in a few of the 25 U.S. in which it currently tests. So what's it like to hand over your daily driving chores to a robot?

Before Tuesday's deal, it raised $2 billion in 2018, led by Toyota Motor Corp and financial firms, including Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital. Singapore-headquartered Grab has taken its ride-hailing business to 235 cities in eight countries in Southeast Asia in the past six years. It is looking to transform itself into a leading consumer technology group, offering services such as food and parcel deliveries, electronic money transfers, micro-loans and mobile payments, besides ride-hailing. Grab will work with Microsoft to explore mobile facial recognition, image recognition and computer vision technologies to improve the pick-up experience, the companies said in a statement on Tuesday. For example, passengers will be able to take a photo of their current location and have it translated into an actual address for the driver.

Smart displays are the new smart speakers. A day after Facebook revealed Portal, a WiFi-connected video-chatting device for your home, Google has announced Home Hub, a new 7-inch smart screen that acts as a voice-controlled conduit for the Google Assistant. It's Google's first smart home gadget that's comprised largely of a touchscreen display, after having launched three different display-free smart speakers over the past couple years. The Home Hub is also part of Google's larger strategy to make its virtual assistant infinitely more useful, and also, to get its tech into every facet of your life that it can. Both Google and Facebook's connected displays are coming on the heels of Amazon's second-generation Echo Show, another smart display that's equipped with Alexa and displays snippets of information.

According to mainstream video games, modern warfare is all about cyborg arms, laser shields and jarheads blowing up baddies under the guidance of recognisable character actors. However, the frenetic antics of the Call of Duty series and its ilk are behind the times. The drone pilot protagonist of 2012's free indie game Unmanned is a more accurate representation of a modern soldier: a man who plays video games with his son every weekend, and who has also killed countless foreigners from a grey-walled cubicle in Nevada. You play an American warrior, square of jaw and beefy of build, who works from an office out in the desert. A click of his mouse sends tons of missile plummeting from anonymous drone planes with an eerie blank space where you'd expect to see a cockpit.

Companies in all industries must stay up to date with the latest tech to survive in this digital world. This is especially true in the case of machine learning (ML), which has the potential to transform the way businesses process and use their data. While ML has a number of useful applications in the business world, applying it to business intelligence (BI) insights can help you optimize your processes and make even better decisions. Thirteen members of Forbes Technology Council shared some creative ways to combine business intelligence with machine learning to produce the best results for your company. One of the most unique ways to combine business intelligence and machine learning is the identification of fraud indicators.

Facebook wants to be invited into your living room. The company has revealed details about its Amazon Echo competitor, a voice-controlled, webcam-equipped smart screen named Portal. Arriving in the US in November, Facebook Portal is a $199 (£152) 10-inch screen, with two speakers and a high-quality webcam attached, which the company hopes users will put in their living rooms and kitchens and use to launch video chats with friends and loved ones. The device, which also comes in a larger model, Portal, for $349, can play music from Spotify, videos from Facebook Watch, and act as a photo frame when not in use. It is controlled using voice commands, although Facebook has eschewed the personal approach of competitors such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa in favour of a more disembodied presence: users initiate instructions with: "Hey Portal." Surprisingly, the device is not just a competitor to the Echo; it also has Alexa built-in.

Robotic arms wait to make drinks at The Tipsy Robot in Las Vegas. Robotic arms wait to make drinks at The Tipsy Robot in Las Vegas. At the Vdara Hotel and Spa in Las Vegas, robots are at the front line of room service. "Jett" and "Fetch" are delivery robots, designed to look like dogs, each about three feet high. They can bring items from the hotel's cafe right to your room.