Will humans still drive in the future? I was recently asked to join the debate over at 2025AD, a blog focused on the year many have claimed will be the watershed for the arrival of self-driving cars. I'm pessimistic, but convinced there is a silver lining. Journalist John McElroy, with whom I disagree bigly. I'm of two minds on whether people will still drive.

Fintech startups looking to disrupt payday lending are using artificial intelligence to make loans with rates as low as 6% and with default rates of 7% or less. AI can make a difference on several fronts, the startups say. It can process enormous amounts of data that traditional analytics programs can't handle, including data scraped constantly off the borrower's phone. It can find patterns of creditworthiness or lack thereof on its own, without having to be told of every clue and correlation, startups like Branch.co And the cost savings of eliminating the need for loan officers lets these companies make the loans at a profit.

The line for the SXSW panel'Eyes in the Sky: The Future of AI and Satellites' snaked around many corners in Austin's JW Marriot Hotel – understandably, AI coupled with space shit, bring it on. Spaceknow Inc's CEO Pavel Machalek did most of the talking during this session. Spaceknow is a San Francisco based company building an AI system that can process the petabytes of data from the hundreds of commercial satellites circling us up above. Gary Vaynerchuk was so impressed with TNW Conference 2016 he paused mid-talk to applaud us. "We are digitizing the physical world, so we can build apps on top it," Machalek stated. According to the Czech CEO, we're currently going through a sea of change in how we use satellite data.

The line for the SXSW panel'Eyes in the Sky: The Future of AI and Satellites' snaked around many corners in Austin's JW Marriot Hotel – understandably, AI coupled with space shit, bring it on. Spaceknow Inc's CEO Pavel Machalek did most of the talking during this session. Spaceknow is a San Francisco based company building an AI system that can process the petabytes of data from the hundreds of commercial satellites circling us up above. We're covering the weird and wonderful tech at SXSW, join us in the fun. "We are digitizing the physical world, so we can build apps on top it," Machalek stated. According to the Czech CEO, we're currently going through a sea of change in how we use satellite data.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere: your smartphone, on streaming platforms such as Spotify and Netflix and even in some smart home appliances. But can the technology, which has seemingly caught the attention of most VCs across the world, be used in the realm of healthcare to drive efficiency and optimise patient outcomes? We take a look at some of the UK's most promising companies using AI to transform the healthcare space. No list of this kind would be complete without a mention of DeepMind, a British artificial intelligence company founded in 2010 and acquired by tech giant Google for a reported £400m four years later. DeepMind Health is leveraging machine learning technology – a form of AI – to boost the medical research field.

Pattern Based Heuristics 2.4 Machine Learning and Response Generation in Chatbots 2.5 Chatbot Ecosystem 2.5.1 Native Chatbots 2.5.2

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. Elon Musk, the South African-born CEO of Tesla and SpaceX deep in thought during his 2013 SXSW keynote. While Austin is known for its BBQ, this week the tech industry descends on the Texas capital for the best brain food on the tech conference circuit, the South By South West (SXSW) festival which starts on Friday.

Artificial intelligence advertising firm LoopMe has won an additional $10m funding, a total of $17 million to date, as machine learning becomes a vital part of digital marketing. The new funding was received from Impulse VC and Harbert European Growth Capital to support global growth and continued investment in artificial intelligence technology. Existing investors Holzbrinck Ventures and Open Ocean Capital also participated in the round. LoopMe now counts investment from UK, Germany, Finland, North America, China and Russia, signaling global support for its AI technology. LoopMe's AI technology learns how people feel about and react to advertising, and changes their advertising experience based on their individual feedback loop. Since receiving its previous round of funding in 2015, LoopMe reached profitability for the full year 2016, more than doubled its sales revenue and team size, opened offices in LA, Bangalore, Johannesburg and Moscow, and invested heavily in its technology.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) may have a big role in Africa's eHealth strategies. An article in Wired says it's hugely successful at poker too. From the 1940s, chess was the test of AI. It's a game of structured rules that computers could learn. To succeed, it has to outmanoeuvre other players' bluffs and intuition and deal with only partial information about the state of each game too, which aren't structured or rule-based. Libratus, built by Brown and Sandholm, two computer science researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, did it.

Mumbai: As pro vice-chancellor (product and partner development) of the University of Sunderland in the UK, Prof. John MacIntyre's brief includes covering research, innovation, knowledge exchange, employer engagement and regional economy. Since 1996, MacIntyre has also been the editor-in-chief of Neural Computing and Applications--an international scientific peer- reviewed journal published by Springer Verlag. In an interview, he talks about why artificial intelligence (AI) needs to be looked at more positively and how AI can contribute to society. MacIntyre will also address EmTech India 2017--an emerging tech conference organized by Mint and MIT Technology Review--on 9 March in New Delhi. You completed your PhD in applied AI, focussing on the use of neural networks in predictive maintenance.