In the last two months Michael Marks has turned down a dozen offers to make keynote speeches at conferences. His company, construction startup Katerra, is three years old, but the attention surge is very recent. "Construction technology has gotten kinda buzzy," he says. But more likely, interest in Katerra has spiked because in January, the company landed an astounding $867 million in venture funding led by the SoftBank Vision Fund. A deal of that size, led by the venture industry's most talked-about fund, will put a company on the map overnight.

Most Chinese consumers have likely never heard of SenseTime. But depending on where they live, it might be looking at their faces several times a day. If a person goes shopping at Suning, one of China's largest electronics retailers, it's possible that a camera in the store is tracking her behavior using SenseTime's software. Later, if she opens Rong360, a peer-to-peer lending app, she'll be asked to login using facial recognition--powered by SenseTime. She might send a video of herself to her friends on SNOW, a Snapchat-esque chat app, donning animated sunglasses built by SenseTime.

China will be the world's dominant player in artificial intelligence by 2030. A State Council document, issued in July last year, resolved to position China as the world's pre-eminent practitioner of artificial intelligence (AI) in both research and application within the next 12 years. Governments across the world are rushing to support innovation in AI, but none has published as coherent a plan as China and – more importantly – has the ability to get things done: the Chinese government can implement policy in ways that are impossible in western democracies. Intent, however, is one thing: to paraphrase the boxer Mike Tyson, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. The Chinese not only have a strategy, they have a track record of delivering on large-scale, ambitious projects.

We are surrounded by machine learning, it is "under the hood" of systems we use everyday, says Olivier Klein, head of emerging technologies for Asia Pacific at Amazon Web Services. These systems can range in the spam filter for emails, to the facial recognition systems used at airports. "Cloud is normal, machine learning is the new normal," says Klein. Klein says machine learning helps organisations create new and seamless experiences for customers, or citizens, in the case of government agencies. This can be through the use of a natural interface such as voice or facial recognition to create a frictionless experience for users.

We are surrounded by machine learning, it is "under the hood" of systems we use everyday, says Olivier Klein, head of emerging technologies for Asia Pacific at Amazon Web Services. These systems can range in the spam filter for emails, to the facial recognition systems used at airports. "Cloud is normal, machine learning is the new normal," says Klein. Klein says machine learning helps organisations create new and seamless experiences for customers, or citizens, in the case of government agencies. This can be through the use of a natural interface such as voice or facial recognition to create a frictionless experience for users.

In contemporary sci-fi--HBO's "Westworld," for example--sentient machines take up arms against humanity. In the real world, intelligent--and increasingly autonomous--robots are being created with weapons already in hand. More than 16 countries (not to mention terrorist groups like the Islamic State) already possess armed drones. Militaries around the globe are racing to deploy robots at sea, on the ground and in the air. For now, these machines operate mostly under human control, but that may not be the case for long.

EY has announced that it will collaborate with InsurTech company Concirrus to support the adoption of behavioural-based underwriting and risk management in marine insurance, using artificial intelligence (AI) powered software. The partnership is intended to help modernise the marine sector's traditional demographic based underwriting models, which rely on data like the age, size and flag of a vessel, and which are under increasing pressure to underwrite risks better and faster. Concirrus has developed AI-driven software that utilises new sensor, machine and analytical capabilities, which can help re/insurers better understand their exposures and control claims. Harnessing these technologies at scale, the partnership will allow marine re/insurers to better manage their risk portfolio and develop more accurate underwriting models by utilising behaviour analysis and considering factors like a vessel's speed and location. Chris Payne, Head of Insurance Technology, Europe, Middle East, India & Africa (EMEIA) at EY, said: "Driving innovation within the specialty insurance market is something we are very focused on. The unique toolsets and data that Concirrus has access to will drive new insights in the marine insurance industry, and we are thrilled to be working together. "Leveraging EY's insurance knowledge and longstanding relationships in the industry, and Concirrus' unique combination of data and proprietary technology, we can help insurers, brokers and Protection and indemnity insurance clubs enter a new world of marine insurance." Andy Yeoman, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Concirrus, also commented: "EY's domain knowledge and expertise at scaling technology will be a great addition to our software.

On impeaching Trump: "I think impeaching and removing Donald Trump from office would let the American people off the hook and have something happen indirectly that I believe they're duty bound to do directly. People in this country need to stand up and go to the voting booth and vote their values." On Charlottesville: "A person who sees moral equivalence in Charlottesville, who talks about and treats women like they're pieces of meat, who lies constantly about matters big and small and insists the American people believe it, that person's not fit to be president of the United States, on moral grounds." On Trump's intelligence: "I don't buy this stuff about him being mentally incompetent or early stages of dementia. He strikes me as a person of above average intelligence who's tracking conversations and knows what's going on."

Do neural networks represent a shift in coding? Tesla's director of AI Andrej Karpathy in his note on Software 2.0 has coined this new term which emphasises a shift in developing and writing software. His take on the question is that training neural nets and predicting using them involves a new way of thinking of software. The earlier methodology, according to Karpathy, involved writing code, say, in Python and putting it in production. However, when it comes to training neural nets -- the developer has to set up a framework for the neural net to properly "learn" and repeatedly feed examples through it of what the correct answer is to "teach" it.

We are very lucky and privileged to be living in an era that is witnessing the greatest transformation in the history of human civilization. We are edging closer to creating entities that will be as smart as us, or even smarter. The progress we have been making in our quest to create smarter machines are astonishing, and right now we stand at a point were these machines are taking over the world from humans, one step at a time. The best and easily visible demonstration of this human to machine transition is seen in the space of chatbots. In recent years, chatbots have occupied several roles in the service industry, especially in the are of customer support.