The latest gee-whiz project from Amazon is the Scout robot, a cooler-sized automated delivery device that rolls along sidewalks to transport shipments to your home. Amazon's planes, drones, delivery trucks and relationship with the U.S. Postal Service apparently are not all-inclusive enough to handle the online retailing giant's logistical challenges. Enter Scout, an electric-powered delivery robot. Amazon has begun testing six of the cooler-sized, six-wheeled robots in a neighborhood in Snohomish County, Washington, about 60 miles northeast of Amazon's Seattle headquarters. Initially, the Scout robots will operate Monday through Friday during the daytime.

We can build robot teachers, or even robot teaching assistants. And if the answer is yes, what's the right mix of human and machine in the classroom? To get a fresh perspective on that question, this episode we take you to China, where a couple of us from EdSurge recently traveled for a reporting trip. One of the events we attended was a two-day conference about artificial intelligence in education organized by a company called Squirrel AI. It's vision felt unusually utopian.

Bing has been blocked in China, Microsoft has said. The outage makes the search engine the latest of a whole host of foreign technologies to be taken down by China's "great firewall", which controls what people can see from within the country. Bing was the only major foreign search engine available in the country. "We've confirmed that Bing is currently inaccessible in China and are engaged to determine next steps," the company said in a statement. It is the U.S. technology giant's second setback in China since November 2017 when its Skype internet phone call and messaging service was pulled from Apple and Android app stores.

The snow-clad Swiss Alps offer me a big white canvas each year to exchange ideas with the mélange of minds that shape the world. As part of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, this year, representatives of the WEF, as well as experts from business, politics and academia will convene to strategise on the theme of Globalisation 4.0 and creating a global architecture to leverage the best of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Bold business models It is quintessential to evaluate the existing means and business models of economic growth and a dramatic change is inevitable. A bolder approach to business models, policies, collaborations and alliances is the need of the hour. Identifying the Globalisation 4.0 charter The key will be whether we can rise to the challenge of Globalisation 4.0 and collaborate to disrupt.

Apple (AAPL) dismissed just over 200 employees this week from Project Titan, its stealthy autonomous vehicle group, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. "We have an incredibly talented team working on autonomous systems and associated technologies at Apple. As the team focuses their work on several key areas for 2019, some groups are being moved to projects in other parts of the company, where they will support machine learning and other initiatives, across all of Apple," the spokesperson said. "We continue to believe there is a huge opportunity with autonomous systems, that Apple has unique capabilities to contribute, and that this is the most ambitious machine learning project ever," they added. In August 2018, Apple enlisted a Tesla (TSLA) engineering vice president and Apple veteran, Doug Field, to lead the Titan team alongside Bob Mansfield.

One hotel in Japan learned the hard way that robots are not always right for the job. Henn na Hotel in Tokyo is laying off half of its nearly 250 robots because they failed to do their automated tasks and humans had to intervene in their operations, the Wall Street Journal via Business Insider reported on Jan. 17. The hotel began employing robots in 2015 with the goal of becoming "the most efficient hotel in the world" and to respond to a worker shortage. Those laid off included Churi, a pink, egg-shaped virtual assistant assigned in each room, who could not keep up with the likes of Siri and Alexa. For instance, she failed to answer guests' questions on opening hours of local businesses.

This is a visualization of global internet attacks, seen during the 4th China Internet Security Conference in Beijing. Microsoft's Bing search engine is no longer accessible in China, the company reports. This is a visualization of global internet attacks, seen during the 4th China Internet Security Conference in Beijing. Microsoft's Bing search engine is no longer accessible in China, the company reports. The Microsoft search engine, Bing, appears to have been blocked in China since Wednesday.

The mobile vending machine that PepsiCo recently launched at University of the Pacific has caused excitement among college students craving for a quick refreshment, but the U.S. food giant suggested that this is only the tip of the iceberg of when it comes to providing food service using artificial intelligence. The self-driving robots, named as Snackbot, were developed through a partnership between PepsiCo and the Bay Area-based Robby Technologies. At the moment, they deliver snacks and beverages from PepsiCo's better-for-you portfolio Hello Goodness, which includes Smartfood Delight, Baked Lay's, SunChips, Pure Leaf Iced Tea, bubly, LIFEWTR and Starbucks Cold Brew. The Hello Goodness range was launched in 2015, and it has been boosting PepsiCo's e-commerce and vending businesses. The company previously conducted a Hello Goodness store test on Amazon back in 2017, and it showed its healthy snacking portfolio performed nearly 45% better than the sales from other similar campaigns and return on investment for advertising.

Until now, text-to-image artificial intelligence produced synthetic images by looking at visually descriptive phrases like "this pink and yellow flower has a beautiful yellow center with many stamens" or, "a small bird with black eye, black head, and dark bill." Microsoft has such technology that is so good, it could theoretically replace Google Images' results with photorealistic fakes. But the new AI algorithms developed by computer scientists Ori Bar El, Ori Licht, and Netanel Yosephian at Tel Aviv University don't require you to visually describe anything: It can generate fake photos of food from text recipes that list the ingredients and the method of preparation but don't contain any visual description of how the final plate looks. The AI wasn't allowed to read the title of the recipe to generate the image, as it may be descriptive enough on its own. It exclusively used the ingredients and the instructions.

Although machines will replace more humans in jobs by 2025, there will still be a net increase of 58 million new jobs brought by the development of artificial intelligence over the next five years, according to a report released by the World Economic Forum currently held in Tianjin, The Paper reported. The report, "2018 Future Employment," says the development of automation and smart technology will replace 75 million jobs, but another 133 million new jobs will emerge. It also believes that there will be "significant changes" in the quality, location and form of new jobs. The number of full-time jobs will decrease as more companies choose to use freelancers or professional contractors. As the division of labour between machines and humans continues to grow, employees will also need to constantly learn new skills.