These days, even when I read news about India's state owned air carrier, as "New AI connectivity between cities X & Y", the first connection my (poor human) brain makes is to Artificial Intelligence. Only then it connects to Air India. This is because everyone (in my extended professional circle) is talking of Artificial Intelligence. Though I had done a short elective on AI in my computer engineering days (16 years back), done some basic LISP programming as part of it, had presented a paper on'Genetic Algorithms' in a seminar (again that long ago), and am an avid watcher of Sci-Fi movies around AI (and claim to have understood Matrix the first time I watched it - with subtitles though, ha!), I realize that my knowledge of what AI is, is no better than a layperson (or worse, since half knowledge is more dangerous). This article is an endeavor to sort of unpack AI (and the associated words like ML - machine learning, DL - deep learning) for myself. And publishing it around to benefit others that are in a similar boat. And also to get feedback from others to correct my understanding. Without much dumbing down (or may be with), Artificial Intelligence is fundamentally anything that a computing machine does. Even the basic accountant calculator that does 2 2 4 is'artificial intelligence'. However, we do not consider them as'AI' because of what is called'AI effect' - When we know'how' a machine does something'intelligent,' it ceases to be regarded as intelligent. Tools we take for granted (pick any of your favorite app) are all'AI'. Anything that is'eaten by software' can be considered as Artificial Intelligence. And why is everyone talking about it?

In 1849 Austria sent unmanned, bomb-filled balloons to attack Venice. UAV innovations started in the early 1900s and originally focused on providing practice targets for training military personnel. UAV development during World War I: the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company invented a pilotless aerial torpedo that would explode at a preset time. The earliest attempt at a powered UAV was A. M. Low's "Aerial Target" in 1916. Nikola Tesla described a fleet of unmanned aerial combat vehicles in 1915.

The village is poor, even by the standards of rural Kenya. To get there, you follow a power line along a series of unmarked roads. Eventually, that power line connects to the school at the center of town, the sole building with electricity. Homesteads fan out into the hilly bramble, connected by rugged paths. There is just one working water tap, requiring many local women to gather water from a pit in jerrycans.

Technology is about change just about everything in healthcare--here's how. The future of healthcare is happening right now. While that future is just barely forming, we are beginning to see how technology is now scratching the surface of an entirely different landscape when it comes to healthcare delivery both within and outside of the U.S. According to PwC Health Research Institute's annual report, 2017 is the year to prepare for the arrival of several technologies poised to disrupt the industry. This myriad of tech-driven innovation will impact just about everything from supply chain and operations to business models and essential healthcare management practices and procedures. Here's a look at report's eight proposed technologies poised with the potential to change it all: We are already witnessing the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare through IBM's Watson, a supercomputer that first impressed us by beating Jeopardy opponents but is now tasked with beating a jeopardy of a different kind--cancer.

What would it look like to ask a deep learning AI system to watch every political television advertisement of the 2016 presidential campaign season for two months and describe what it sees? That was the question I asked last February when I collaborated with the Internet Archive to take all 267 political ads they had identified (which had aired a collective 72,807 times as monitored by the Archive) and ran them frame-by-frame through Google's Cloud Vision API, producing what is likely the first large-scale application of production deep learning algorithms to describe the visual narratives of political advertising on television. Now, what if we took this same approach and instead of examining television, we looked at a quarter billion news photographs compiled from online news outlets in nearly every country of the world over the course of 2016? What would AI see in that vast archive of the visual narratives of the world's media? Google's Cloud Vision API is a commercial cloud service that accepts as input any arbitrary photograph and uses deep learning algorithms to catalog a wealth of data about each image, including a list of objects and activities it depicts, recognizable logos, OCR text recognition in almost 80 languages, levels of violence, an estimate of visual sentiment and even the precise location on earth the image appears to depict.

Octopus-like robots are plucking strawberries in Spain, in the US machines are vacuuming apples off the trees, and in the UK they are feeding and milking cows. Robots are taking over fields around the world, and last week food and rural affairs secretary Andrea Leadsom suggested they could help replace the thousands of EU workers who currently help put food on British tables. And it is not just Brexit that is forcing the agricultural industry to embrace the next phase of mechanisation. Farmers are already having to rethink their operations in the face of higher minimum pay – mainly a result of the national living wage for over-25s, which came into effect last year. Robotic milking machines, in which cows queue up to milk themselves, are now mainstream, while systems tat automatically feed or track the health of livestock are on the rise.

The ocean is essential to the livelihoods and food security of billions of people around the globe. Shipping, tourism, transport, fisheries, oil and gas, renewable energy all depend on the sea. Two years ago, economists put a dollar value on what our oceans are worth and came up with $24 trillion. If it were a country, the sea would be the seventh-largest economy on the planet. "When you look at the blue economy, it has an asset value of $24 trillion and that's delivering something between $4-500bn each year in terms of the dividend to humanity," says Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute.

At Piton de la Fournaise on the island of Réunion, every day is like a glimpse of our planet's violent youth: Chunks of boiling lava spew upward like molten fireworks, while rivers of fire cut across an ashen, constantly repaved landscape of gray. Sitting more than 400 miles off Madagascar's eastern coast, the volcano has been grumbling for 530,000 years, producing extremely fluid, basalt-rich lava flows. In modern times, it's been one of the most active volcanoes on Earth, earning its moniker "peak of the furnace." Since the 17th century, the 8,633-foot-tall peak has erupted more than 150 times. It's no surprise that the French-held island's 900,000 inhabitants treat the volcano with caution. But thanks to drone pilot and Your Shot photographer Jonathan Payet, we get to sneak a peek at the furnace in remarkable detail.

Editor's note: We're proud to bring NextDraft--the most righteous, most essential newsletter on the web--to WIRED.com. Every Friday you'll get a roundup of the week's most popular must-read stories from around the internet, courtesy of mastermind Dave Pell. As it becomes increasingly clear that artificial intelligence and other technologies are going to be history's most aggressive job killers, more people (in Silicon Valley and elsewhere) are re-examining the possibility that a universal basic income could provide a solution. But as NYT Mag's Annie Lowrey reports, "No experiment has been truly complete, studying what happens when you give a whole community money for an extended period of time -- when nobody has to worry where his or her next meal is coming from or fear the loss of a job or the birth of a child." But now, in a few villages in Kenya, a non-profit is looking to run the biggest such experiment yet.

Robotics undoubtedly has the potential to improve lives in the developing world. However, with limited budgets and expertise on the ground, putting this technology in place is no small task. Step forwards WeRobotics, a new Swiss/American NGO dedicated to meeting this goal through the creation of in-country'flying labs'. Co-founder Adam Klaptocz explains all. Let's start with this: what is WeRobotics?