"Robots Are Replacing Humans at All These Wall Street Firms". This was the title of a Fortune article, almost ten days ago. The article referred to BlackRock's announcement they would replace human managers with artificial intelligence-powered algorithms. According to PwC, automation may substitute 38% of all American jobs, a tendency that is particularly evident in financial sectors, where by 2025 almost 10% of the human workforce will be replaced by computers. Technological progress has always created wealth and new jobs.

Consciousness is a thriving industry. Consciousness is a buzzing business in neuroscience labs and brain institutes. Just a few decades ago, consciousness barely registered as a credible subject for science. Perhaps no one did more to legitimize its study than Francis Crick, who launched a second career in neurobiology after cracking the genetic code. In the 1980s Crick found a brilliant collaborator in the young scientist Christof Koch. In some ways, they made an unlikely team. Crick, a legend in science, was an outspoken atheist, while Koch, 40 years younger, was a Catholic yearning for ultimate meaning. Together, they published a series of pioneering articles on the neural correlates of consciousness until Crick died in 2004. Koch went on to a distinguished career at Caltech before joining the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. Today, as the president and chief scientific officer, he supervises several hundred scientists, engineers, and informatics experts trying to map the brain and figure out how our neural circuits process information. The Institute recently made news with the discovery of three giant neurons connecting many regions of the mouse brain, including one that wraps around the entire brain. The neurons extend from a set of cells known as the claustrum, which Crick and Koch maintained could act as a seat of consciousness. Koch is one of the great thinkers about consciousness. He has a philosophical frame of mind and jumps readily from one big idea to the next.

As a tech writer, I sometimes feel about new technology the way I suspect military historians must feel about war: You just can't say you love every aspect of your subject. My default model for "tomorrow" is built on the bright and exciting images of yesterday's tomorrow, from "Star Trek" and Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and Tom Swift. As naïve as it may sound, I inherited from the books, films and TV shows of my childhood a basically progressive view: Despite bumps and missteps occasionally setting us back along the way, technology ultimately would lead to a better future. And I believe it has. Despite the anxiety we seem to thrive on these days, this is a safer world than the one I was born into nearly 70 years ago.

Recall Sunday, April 10, 2016. Jordan Spieth had just teed off in the final group of a sure-to-be exciting day at Augusta National. The Irishman drew his ball to the center of the 16th green, where it curled left and toward the hole. It fell in the cup for an ace and created the first roar in what seemed like days. Lowry punched both fists high in the air, spanked Patrick Reed's open hand and gave his best Kirk Gibson impression, much to the delight of fans in the stands, Verne Lundquist in the CBS booth and, behind some glass doors hundreds of yards away, International Business Machines (better known as IBM).

The New York Times bestseller, from leading innovation expert Alec Ross, a "fascinating vision" (Forbes) of what's next for the world and how to navigate the changes the future will bring. While Alec Ross was working as Senior Advisor for Innovation to the Secretary of State, he traveled to forty-one countries, exploring the latest advances coming out of every continent. From startup hubs in Kenya to R&D labs in South Korea, Ross has seen what the future holds. In The Industries of the Future, Ross provides a "lucid and informed guide" (Financial Times) to the changes coming in the next ten years. He examines the fields that will most shape our economic future, including robotics and artificial intelligence, cybercrime and cybersecurity, the commercialization of genomics, the next step for big data, and the impact of digital technology on money and markets.

An extremely sophisticated Android app designed to spy on users has been discovered by security researchers. Called Chrysaor, it's capable of spying on users through their smartphone camera and microphone, as well as accessing messages, emails, contact details and browser history. In Greek mythology, Chrysaor was the brother of Pegasus, the winged horse. The spyware was thus named because it's believed to be linked to Pegasus, spyware that was found to be targeting handsets running iOS last year. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

Researchers have combined satellite imagery with AI to predict areas of poverty across the world. There's little reliable data on local incomes in developing countries, which hampers efforts to tackle the problem. A team from Stanford University were able to train a computer system to identify impoverished areas from satellite and survey data in five African countries. Neal Jean, Marshall Burke and colleagues say the technique could transform efforts to track and target poverty in developing countries. "The World Bank, which keeps the poverty data, has for a long time considered anyone who is poor to be someone who lives on below $1 a day," Dr Burke, assistant professor of Earth system science at Stanford, told the BBC's Science in Action programme.

Databases are widespread, yet extracting relevant data can be difficult. Without substantial domain knowledge, multivariate search queries often return sparse or uninformative results. This paper introduces an approach for searching structured data based on probabilistic programming and nonparametric Bayes. Users specify queries in a probabilistic language that combines standard SQL database search operators with an information theoretic ranking function called predictive relevance. Predictive relevance can be calculated by a fast sparse matrix algorithm based on posterior samples from CrossCat, a nonparametric Bayesian model for high-dimensional, heterogeneously-typed data tables. The result is a flexible search technique that applies to a broad class of information retrieval problems, which we integrate into BayesDB, a probabilistic programming platform for probabilistic data analysis. This paper demonstrates applications to databases of US colleges, global macroeconomic indicators of public health, and classic cars. We found that human evaluators often prefer the results from probabilistic search to results from a standard baseline.

Amazon just made news when its Prime Air delivery drone did its first public demo, landing on a lawn in California to drop off a few bottles of sunscreen for attendees of an Amazon conference on automation. But the cofounder and CTO of the drone delivery startup Zipline doesn't think much of Amazon's experiments in this area, or Google's either. Have you been near one of those quadrocopters when it sets down, Zipline's Keenan Wyrobek asks? "They're huge things with the power and blade size of four lawnmowers," he says. While Amazon dropped off sunscreen for Silicon Valley insiders, and Google has talked with Domino's about pizza delivery, Zipline is delivering life-saving blood to hospitals in Rwanda.

On this last day of the quarter, the stock market is so tickled with its Q1 spoils that it's about to give a bit back. That is how it usually goes when the S&P 500 is up nicely for a three-month stretch, note Bespoke Investment Group's number crunchers. They checked out how the last trading day has gone when the S&P is up at least 5% for a quarter. That final session is typically a bust, with the index retreating 0.4% on average, according to Bespoke's look at the last eight years. But who knows exactly how the S&P will close today?