The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays. Artificial Intelligence is transforming the way we live, and the tech giants are racing to stay ahead of the curve. AI-related funding totaled an estimated $15.2 billion in 2017, a 144% increase over the previous year. The U.S. tech industry leads with a 50% share of those investments, even with China swiftly closing the gap in terms of patents and AI research. AI itself isn't new, but boosted computing power, increased connectivity, and the sheer volume of data has paved the way for the fourth industrial revolution of AI. "The coming era will be looked back upon as the'AI era,' when AI became the defining competitive advantage for corporations, government agencies, and investment professionals," predicts David Nadler, founder of Kensho Technologies.

Among the critical elements required to support expanding Internet of Things deployments are wider wireless pipes that consume less power. That's the promise of IoT networks supported by emerging fifth-generation, or 5G, wireless network rollouts that go well beyond mobile phones to support networks of connected devices. As wireless carriers jockey for position--including a proposed merger between T-Mobile and Sprint--emerging IoT applications such as low-power, wide area connections are forecast to grow at a more than 200-percent annual rate through 2021. Industry tracker IHS Markit predicts in an updated forecast released this week that emerging 5G-based connections will help boost machine-to-machine connections as well new IoT platforms and services. "In order to scale up IoT revenues, operators will need to pursue a broader IoT strategy that goes beyond connectivity into IoT platforms, vertical offerings and ecosystem orchestration," notes Julian Watson, senior IoT analyst at IHS. "By pre-integrating partner platforms, hardware and sensors into their IoT offerings, operators can make it easier for enterprises to plan and budget for IoT projects."

BMW on Saturday showed off the electric, autonomous "Vision iNext" SUV in Beijing as part of a publicity tour in which the prototype car and a stage have traveled around the world in the hold of a Lufthansa cargo jet. The vehicle, with gas and brake pedals that sink into the floor during autonomous driving and touch-screen controls embedded in the rear seat cushion, hints at an electric vehicle BMW could launch among 12 fully electric models it has promised by 2025.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are being adopted into the enterprise at a rapid clip and adoption is likely to surge in 2019. What comes next is the real business challenge: How will we manage technology that we likely don't understand? The issue is likely to bubble up in the year ahead. For now, most of us are lulled into thinking more algorithms are better and even assuming we can outsource critical thought to models. Why hurt our brains when we can trust Einstein, Watson, Alexa, Google Assistant, and other software tools to think for us?

The transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on every industry is indisputable, as is its effect on the labour market. Will AI benefit the labour market over the next decade and beyond, or will it change it and replace humans? The continuous interaction and integration of data, algorithms and use cases are driving AI development. AI has cut positions, broken the bottleneck of human efficiency, reduced standardized and repetitive work, changed the nature of work and enhanced work efficiency. At the same time, it has created new jobs.

As the power of artificial intelligence grows, the likelihood of a future war filled with killer robots grows as well. Proponents suggest that lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWs) might cause less "collateral damage," while critics warn that giving machines the power of life and death would be a terrible mistake. Last month's UN meeting on'killer robots' in Geneva ended with victory for the machines, as a small number of countries blocked progress towards an international ban. Some opponents of such a ban, like Russia and Israel, were to be expected since both nations already have advanced military AI programs. But surprisingly, the U.S. also agreed with them.

Billions of text posts, photos, and videos are uploaded to social media every day, a firehose of information that's impossible for human moderators to sift through comprehensively. And so companies like Facebook and YouTube have long relied on artificial intelligence to help surface things like spam and pornography. Something like a white supremacist meme, though, can be more challenging for machines to flag, since the task requires processing several different visual elements at once. Automated systems need to detect and "read" the words that are overlaid on top of the photo, as well as analyze the image itself. Memes are also complicated cultural artifacts, which can be difficult to understand out of context. Despite the challenges they bring, some social platforms are already using AI to analyze memes, including Facebook, which this week shared details about how it uses a tool called Rosetta to analyze photos and videos that contain text.

With the amount of news out of Japan this week, you'd think Tokyo Game Show had already started. That didn't stop a flood of trailers though, including new footage of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Project Judge, a new game from the Yakuza devs. Other than that, an avalanche of weirdness this week: Alan Wake's headed to TV, Pathologic 2 showed off its creepy village, Katamari Damacy's coming to PC, Assassin's Creed III is getting a remaster (for some reason), and Tencent brought a literal avalanche with its snowboarding battle royale game Ring of Elysium. This is gaming news for September 10 to 14. Much to my surprise, Focus's Call of Cthulhu is one of my most anticipated games in the back half of 2018.

As a geologist and professor I speak and write rather cavalierly about eras and eons. One of the courses I routinely teach is "History of Earth and Life," a survey of the 4.5-billion-year saga of the entire planet--in a 10-week trimester. But as a human, and more specifically as a daughter, mother, and widow, I struggle like everyone else to look Time honestly in the face. That is, I admit to some time hypocrisy. The now risible "Y2K" crisis that threatened to cripple global computer systems and the world economy at the turn of the millennium was caused by programmers in the 1960s and '70s who apparently didn't really think the year 2000 would ever arrive.

Boasting a 6.5inch OLED screen, the iPhone XS Max is the biggest phone Apple has ever made. While on paper the screen may seem almost too big, the curved design means that in the flesh, it's incredibly easy to pick up and handle - and absolutely stunning to look at. There is something of a jaw dropping moment the first time you load up a picture of press play on the movie. Apple's new iPhone XS Max is shown (right) beside the smaller XS That screen is sharp and incredibly bright, and the phone (and even the still present notch) are almost invisible, making this the closest thing yet to Apple's'all screen' vision. The sound has also had a huge boost, and even in the crowded scrum like experience of the hands on area at Apple's event, audio was loud enough to hear clearly - if you want to annoy the neighbours of fellow commuters, this is definitely the speaker system to do it with.