Before panic descends and we begin imagining scenarios where redundancies abound and pink slips are handed out en masse, let's focus instead on the boring facts. Threats to jobs are enough to rile up anger and anxiety, there is more than enough historical precedence for this. Two hundred years ago, a group of people was so angered by the increasing use of machines in the textile industry that they smashed the machines in protest -- these were the Luddites. In response, the British government made breaking machines a capital offense. The Smithsonian magazine, while describing the upheaval of the times, explained that "as the Industrial Revolution began, workers were naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves "were totally fine with machines"'. The article quoted Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites, who added that "they confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called "a fraudulent and deceitful manner" to get around standard labor practices." The question of man vs. machine is something that many have struggled with. As part of his protest against British imperialism, the Father of the Indian nation, Mahatma Gandhi, burnt machine-made clothes and encouraged people to adopt the Indian handwoven fabric called Khadi. He said, "I have the conviction within me that, when all these achievements of the machine age will have disappeared, these our handicrafts will remain; when all exploitation will have ceased, service and honest labor will remain.

Sophia, a life-like humanoid robot, is pictured at the UN headquarters in New York, Oct. 11, 2017. Sophia was here attending a meeting on "The Future of Everything - Sustainable Development in the Age of Rapid Technological Change". WASHINGTON, March 1 (Xinhua) -- China is gaining momentum in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry, which has been translating its huge market size into commercialized innovations. This is a boon instead of a threat. The cry-wolf alarms that America is losing a race for supremacy in the AI industry by comparing China's catching-up to America's Sputnik panic in the late 1950s, have, in a sense, misinterpreted or misrepresented the true AI story. A typical misinterpretation goes to the "global tech cold war," which was put forward by Eurasia Group, a New York-headquartered think tank, arguing that the winner in AI and super-computing between the United States and China will dominate the coming decades, both economically and geopolitically.

Japanese financial services group Orix bought a 6.4 billion yen ($59.8 million) stake in Wecash, a Chinese startup that uses big data and artificial intelligence to rate consumer credit. Wecash can calculate a consumer's creditworthiness in 10 seconds or less using phone records and other personal information, and has partnered with dozens of financial institutions so far. It also suggests potential lenders to consumers looking to take out a loan. The startup relies on information collected with consumers' consent through social media, workplaces and other sources. Only about 30% of the Chinese population is believed to borrow money from banks.

How many doctors does it take to tell you how you're doing? The answer could soon be, none. Scientists and researchers across India are exploring the applications of artificial intelligence in health care -- from helping diagnoses illnesses to monitoring critical care. "Artificial intelligence -- or cyber-physical systems, as I like to call them -- can collect digitised data or generate data, analyse and make decisions based on it," says professor Ashutosh Sharma, secretary of the union government's department of science and technology. "A big advantage of AI in healthcare is that it can help where there is a scarcity of human resources, which is the case in many rural areas," adds Dr P Anandan, CEO at the Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Wadhwani AI).

Trouble is brewing among the students of the Girls Domestic Science School, a well-known private institution at Hitotsubashi, Kanda, which enjoys a good reputation in educational circles and has contributed greatly to the advancement of female education, the courses including sewing, embroidery and foreign-style cooking. The school recently received a monetary donation amounting to ¥13,000 from Mr. Kamesaburo Yamashita, the well-known "narikin" of Kobe, who has amassed a big fortune though the sale of steamers. Several days ago the girls school referred to had a visit from an aged lady, who was alleged to have been sent by Mr. Yamashita, the patron of the school, on the mission of selecting a prospective bride for the son or nephew of the narikin. The old lady was treated by the school faculty with marked respect, and as though she came with the object of inspection, the true purpose of her visit being hidden as far as possible. Madame Haruko Hatoyama, the widow of the late Dr. Hatoyama, ex-minister of justice and dean of Waseda who is the superintendent of the teaching staff of the school, ordered the class to stop the lesson and gave the visitor the privilege of leisurely examining the personal beauty of the girl students of the graduating class of a certain course.

For K-pop stars used to Pop Idol-style fame factories, Tuesday's concert at Blue Square Concert Hall in Seoul was still an artificial first. The 3,000 screaming fans were real, as were chart-topping, body-popping girl groups Spica and Produce 101 -- but all of the songs were written by a London-based song-bot. Each of the tunes in the set had been composed by Moorgate-based Jukedeck. The artificial intelligence (AI) start-up was founded by 30-year-old former King's College Cambridge choristers Ed Newton-Rex and Patrick Stobbs (Stobbs is also a Google alumnus). Simply, the technology reads music and learns what notes, chords and combinations work in order to generate good music.

So if you're looking to learn one of the most desirable skills in tech, you've come to the right place. We've already gone over the top machine learning libraries and open source projects, so now we're taking a close look at frameworks. Developed by a team at the National University of Singapore, Apache Singa is a flexible and scalable deep learning platform for big data analytics. This deep learning framework provides a flexible architecture for scalable distributed training on large volumes of data. Singa is extensible to run over a wide range of hardware.

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Kharagpur: IIT Kharagpur will set up an artificial intelligence centre of excellence that will cover education, training, research, projects, incubation and entrepreneurship. "IIT Kharagpur has developed a deep expertise in the overall area of artificial intelligence, machine learning, data sciences and its applications in several critical domains over a long period of time," institute director Partha Pratim Chakrabarti said on Thursday. "It is time we lead this initiative in artificial intelligence to fulfil the need of the technologies in the 21st century," he said. Capillary Technologies Ltd will provide Rs 5.64 crore to the institute to set up computing infrastructure, hardware simulation platforms, software and the coursework. The Oxford dictionary says artificial intelligence is the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.