One of the problems with working out how close we are to creating a replicant, is that it's not clear what these human-like beings are. Director of the new Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve, has described them as "synthetic humans", which are "not very far from humans". What's clear from the original film is that they are some kind of biorobotic form. Let's for a moment assume they are more like robots than clones and, indeed, in the original Philip K Dick account they are explicitly rogue androids. How close are we to creating an android? Sethu Vijayakumar, Professor of Robotics at the University of Edinburgh, observes that there are two elements to this.

Mobile marketing is widely used nowadays by mobile operators, retailers, service providers, and financial institutions, among others. What is more, the use of mobile marketing has continued to grow across all channels – within applications, text messages and push notifications. According to an international survey conducted among marketers, 79% of them agree that mobile marketing is core to their business. Indeed, mobile marketing is increasingly perceived as being directly linked to their business' primary revenue source. But since it's not so easy to send personalized interactions and tailored offers to end-users, you end up with a plateauing of the mobile marketing's acceptance rate. This is where machine learning can help.

After an intense two-day search, local military forces Friday recovered the body of a U.S. Army commando who was inadvertently left behind after a daylight ambush by militants killed three other Green Berets in a rugged border region in Niger. Pentagon officials had not previously announced that a Green Beret was missing in action after the surprise attack on a joint patrol of U.S. commandos and Nigerien troops Wednesday. Six of the 12 Americans on the patrol were killed or wounded. Officials hoped the missing U.S. Army Special Forces operative might still be hiding in the dense brush, rather than taken captive, and launched a massive search-and-rescue mission with aerial drones and other aircraft, as well as Nigerien ground forces. The death of four Green Berets in remote West Africa marks the worst single loss of U.S. forces under fire since President Trump took office.

Automation is coming after jobs, from fast food workers to accountants. We analyzed which jobs are most -- and least -- at risk, given factors including tasks involved, the current commercial deployment of technology, patent activity, regulations, and more. The shift from traditional manufacturing to computer-enabled industry took nearly a century. But the shift from personal computing to billions of smartphones, massive networks, and the IoT has taken just a couple of decades. And the next phase of technological evolution is already underway: advanced neural networks that learn, adapt, and respond to situations. With AI and automation advancing at a breakneck pace, society's capacity to respond is being stretched to the limit. Automation is already all around us. Cities are seeing front-end automated restaurants like Eatsa gaining popularity, while in factories automation has already arguably been a part of life for years (if not decades) in the form of heavy industrial and agricultural robots. Analyzing the automation landscape, we found that 10 million service and warehouse jobs are at high risk of displacement within the next 5 – 10 years in the US alone. This includes jobs like cooks and servers, cleaners and janitors, as well as warehouse workers. Meanwhile, nearly 5 million retail workers are at a medium risk of automation within 10 years. To put these numbers into perspective, estimates are that over a few years the Great Recession of 2007 – 2010 destroyed 8.7 million jobs in the US.

Built on NLP and ML, Artificial Intelligence chatbots are based on the human capability of learning and absorbing information, but imbued with more efficiency. These efficient machines can process 1,000 times faster than humans and will come up with more subtle results. Artificial Intelligence chatbots (if they're artificial intelligence powered at all) are superior to any Artificial Intelligence interface. In Uganda, a startup – mFeyti is developing an Artificial intelligence powered platform that enables people to detect counterfeit drugs. The developers collect information from regulators, importers and manufacturers and then use special identification characteristics to identify drugs well.

Ai Weiwei may be China's most famous contemporary artist and a prolific social justice activist. But at his core, Ai insists, he is simply an observer. Not to mention a relentless documenter -- of the Chinese communist government, of international human rights violations, of the 40-some cats that roam his Beijing art studio and of the longtime team members who populate his Berlin art studio, a 150-year-old underground beer cellar. Tonight it's the moon that has captured Ai's attention. He arrived a few hours ago at LAX and now strolls languidly across his agent's Beverly Hills office courtyard, repeatedly stopping to take photos of the sky.

Crew embark on the first of a trio of October spacewalks to perform maintenance on the International Space Station. MIAMI – As every homeowner on earth knows all too well, every now and then you have to make repairs. There are three scheduled spacewalks that are all about International Space Station maintenance. On Thursday, two American astronauts, Commander Randy Breznik and Flight Engineer Mark Vande Hei, exited the air-lock, climbing out into microgravity as the Space Station passed above the eastern Mediterranean Sea. In this frame from NASA TV, Astronauts Mark Vande Hei, left, and Randy Bresnik work on the International Space Station on Thursday, Oct. 5, 2017.

Some cassava farmers may not be able to tell one plant's debilitating brown streak from another's troubling brown leaf spot--but a smartphone-friendly AI can. Wired reports that researchers have developed a lightweight image-recognition AI that can identify diseases in the cassava plant based on pictures of its leaves. That could be useful, because cassava is one of the most commonly eaten tubers on the planet, but is grown predominantly in developing countries where access to expertise to diagnose unusual crop problems may be limited. In a paper published on the arXiv, the researchers behind the new AI explain how they've used a technique known as transfer learning to retrain an existing image-recognition neural network using just a small number of new images. With just 2,756 pictures of cassava leaves captured from plants in Tanzania, the team was able to build software based on Google's TensorFlow AI library that could reliably identify three crop diseases and two types of pest damage. It could, for instance, discern brown leaf spot with 98 percent accuracy.

– Digital wallets are becoming the new way to pay. Most interesting factor here is to know companies who are most successful in this field actually came out of payment industry with no prior knowledge or payment intelligence but rather came with Artificial Intelligence. How to pay and where to pay, when to pay etc. Disrupted the most unknown and unsecured payment methods like contactless payment systems. Does any one ask any question from these ventures weather their suggested methods are safer, secured or how much vulnerable than chip-enabled plastic cards, and what it might take for contactless systems to be used as widely as cash. How the data or sensitive data of a customer been treated and used in their systems.

Two other Special Forces soldiers were also wounded in the Niger ambush; Lucas Tomlinson has the story for'Special Report.' There was no U.S. surveillance drone overhead at the time of the ambush in Niger which killed three U.S. Army Green Berets and wounded two others Wednesday, multiple officials familiar with the matter tell Fox News. In addition, Fox News has learned the dead and injured soldiers were taken from the firefight by French Puma helicopters. Only one U.S. helicopter was available to pick up the Green Berets. It is not clear why it wasn't used.