Google has made a rare investment in Japan after the company led a follow-on round for AI and machine learning startup ABEJA. The deal amount is undisclosed but a little digging suggests that it is likely a single-digit million U.S. dollar figure. That's because six-year-old ABEJA did confirm that it has now raised JPY 6 billion ($53 million) from investors to date. The company has raised $45 million in disclosed capital, according to Crunchbase, which leaves around $8 million unaccounted for -- although that covers both the Google investment and a previous Series A deal in 2014, which was also undisclosed. Numbers aside, the deal is notable not only because it represents a Google deal in Japan, but because it is strategic in nature.

Apple has made one of the most shocking announcements in its history, and its not a new feature or product. In a strange run of events, Apple froze trading on its stock and was forced to announce that its results were about to disappoint its investors. The announcement was meant primarily for Apple's shareholders, and the wide circle of analysts and financial markets that revolve around them. Tim Cook's letter announcing the change was addressed to its investors, and included information intended for them. As an indication of how rare such a statement is, Apple has not done this since 2002 – long before the iPhone, and just months into the iPod era.

Technology is already in use to help stop poachers. However, it's frequently limited to monitoring poachers when they're already in shooting range, or after the fact. The non-profit group Resolve vows to do better -- it recently developed a newer version of its TrailGuard camera that uses AI to spot poachers in Africa before they can threaten an endangered species. It uses an Intel-made computer vision processor (the Movidius Myriad 2) that can detect animals, humans and vehicles in real-time, giving park rangers a chance to intercept poachers before it's too late. The technology promises to not only be more effective than previous cameras, but more efficient.

Episode Summary: It isn't by chance that birds fly in flocks and fish swim in schools - they're actually smarter when they act in a group. Could it be possible to extend that collective intelligence to human beings, and even AI? Louis Rosenberg is a PhD from Stanford, previously founder of Immersion and who now runs Unanimous AI, a company focusing on harnessing swarm intelligence with human beings. In this episode, Rosenberg speaks about how this collective-intelligence approach has been applied to human beings in terms of garnering improvements in a range of predictions, and he also touches on what this type of swarm intelligence might mean when we talk about multiple AI's in the future.

A Chinese robot has started exploring the far side of the moon. The Chang'e-4 probe will explore the surface and carry out geological experiments. China plans to follow this up with further missions to return moon rock to laboratories on Earth. But it's not just scientists who are fascinated with the moon's hidden face. Musicians, film-makers and, of course, conspiracy theorists have all been inspired by that secret, barren landscape.

The South China Sea is host to a number of countries vying for control in the area. Attempting to develop new tactics and technologies to swing the balance in its favor, China may have found its key advantage – artificial intelligence (AI). Described as an "enabling" technology, in the same way as the combustion engine or electricity, applications range from deep-sea exploration and international investment, to cybersecurity and combat operations. Chinese scientists are currently developing plans for the first-ever AI-run colony on Earth. Designed for unmanned submarine science and defense operations, the project started at the Chinese Academy of Sciences following a visit from President Xi Jinping in April to the deep-sea research institute in Sanya, Hainan province.

Using machine learning to swap out one image for another isn't new, but ask these systems to do something a bit more complicated than a basic faceswap, and you can end up with underwhelming or laughable results. Now, researchers say they have developed a technique that produces far more convincing images for complex tasks, such as swapping out skirts for pants, cups for bottles, or a herd of sheep for a mess of giraffes. Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and the Pohang University of Science and Technology say their technique, InstaGan, stands out for its ability to tackle changes in shape and altering multiple image elements at once. The method, based on generative adversarial networks (GANs), processes instance information, such as the ability to identify objects and boundaries in images. In their paper, the researchers write that they think they are the first to develop such a technique on more complex images "to the best of our knowledge."

Dawn ver.β is a Tokyo cafe in Akasaka where all the table service is performed by 120 cm tall OriHime-D robots that are piloted by people who are paralyzed and work from home; it was inspired by a fictional cafe in the 2008 anime Time of Eve. This video shows how an ALS patient, unable to speak, can use his eyes to type messages that can then be spoken by the OriHime-D robot. And here another paralyzed man using a OriHime-D serves a coffee.

Robots, though a tiny fraction of the workforce, are seeing rapid growth around the world. Though the global average of robots in the factory workforce is one robot for 150 humans, in South Korea, there is a robot for every 20 humans in the manufacturing workforce. The robot to human work ratio in manufacturing around the world is definitely on a rise. As the number of robots working grows, the cost of maintaining robots will also decrease along with the cost of making robots, creating a snowball effect, meaning the number of robots will be rising. In the coming decades, it is predicted over half of the jobs being done by humans will be automated.

As for much of the tech industry, 2018 has been a year of reckoning for artificial intelligence. As AI systems have been integrated into more products and services, the technology's shortcomings have become clearer. Researchers, companies, and the general public have all begun to grapple more with the limitations of AI and its adverse effects, asking important questions like: how is this technology being used, and for whose benefit? This reckoning has been most visible as a parade of negative headlines about algorithmic systems. This year saw the first deaths caused by self-driving cars; the Cambridge Analytica scandal; accusations that Facebook facilitated genocide in Myanmar; the revelation that Google helped the Pentagon train drone surveillance tools; and ethical questions over the tech giant's human-sounding AI assistant. The research group AI Now described 2018 as a year of "cascading scandals" for the field, and it's an accurate, if disheartening, summary.