For 40-year-old Mao Ya, the facial recognition camera that allows access to her apartment house is simply a useful convenience. "If I am carrying shopping bags in both hands, I just have to look ahead and the door swings open," she said. "And my 5-year-old daughter can just look up at the camera and get in. It's good for kids because they often lose their keys." But for the police, the cameras that replaced the residents' old entry cards serve quite a different purpose.

Today, top individuals from around the world convened at the World Government Summit to discuss the agenda that should govern the next generation of governments. Yesterday, a select few of these leaders gathered in a secretive meeting to discuss the guidelines that nations should use as they help their people come to terms with no longer being the only sentient species on the planet. Of course, this was just one of the many topics discussed. Officials also deliberated on the most immediate ways they can implement AI technologies to make our lives better, who should govern AI, and how to best navigate the perilous roads ahead. The event was organized by the AI Initiative from the Future Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and H.E. Omar bin Sultan Al Olama, the UAE's Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence.

It is no coincidence that Bill McDermott, CEO of German software colossus SAP, was invited by the government of Dubai to be a keynote speaker at the World Government Summit. McDermott will share the podium with world leaders, the president of the World Bank, the managing director of the IMF, the quantum physicist/futurist Dr Michio Kaku and the Oxford philosopher Dr Nick Bostrom. Digital transformation is happening in real-time in the UAE, as well as in advanced societies all over the world. Artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning, big data, quantum computing and the Internet of Things will literally rewrite the future of humankind in code and revolutionise the roles of government, business and human communications. I was at a recent meeting with the CEO of a prominent Arab bank who told me that smartphone technologies will force him to slash a third of his branch network.

The AI era is real, but it has ushered in the fear that livelihoods will be lost. However, businesses must ensure that this doesn't happen.

These are tough times for banks. As the Bank of Japan's prolonged ultra-easy money policy weighs on earnings, the emergence of technology like artificial intelligence is transforming the mechanics of financing and threatening to replace thousands of roles with automated systems. The nation's major banks have announced restructuring measures including downsizing to deal with the situation and are rushing to catch-up with digital innovations, but some critics say it could be too late in the game. Negative interest rates introduced by the Bank of Japan in 2016 have been sapping the earning power of banks' core operations. The combined net core business profits of Japan's five big banks -- Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. (MUFG), Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc. (SMFG), Mizuho Financial Group Inc., Resona Holdings Inc. and Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Holdings Inc. -- fell 22.4 percent in April-December from a year earlier, to ¥1.571 trillion.

Artificial intelligence is set to swell the GCC and Egypt's economies to the tune of $320 billion by 2030, according to a report. Globally, the economic uplift could be to the magnitude of $15.7 trillion, more than the current output of China and India combined, according to a report by professional services firm PwC. Within that increase, $6.6 trillion is likely to come from increased productivity, while $9.1 trillion is likely to come from benefits to consumers. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a collective term for computer systems that can sense their environment, think, learn, and take action in response to what they are sensing and their objectives. AI is rapidly evolving, with current technology including autopilots, digital assistants and chatbots.

Just how artificial is Artificial Intelligence? Facebook created a PR firestorm last summer when reporters discovered a human "editorial team" – rather than just unbiased algorithms – selecting stories for its trending topics section. The revelation highlighted an elephant in the room of our tech world: companies selling the magical speed, omnipotence, and neutrality of artificial intelligence (AI) often can't make good on their promises without keeping people in the loop, often working invisibly in the background. So who are the people behind the AI curtain? Cut to Bangalore, India, and meet Kala, a middle-aged mother of two sitting in front of her computer in the makeshift home office that she shares with her husband.

Bangalore: Zendesk has developed and trained deep-learning applications on AWS to deliver new capabilities to customer service organizations and scale it to support current and future application demands. In doing so, it relied on AWS GPU instances and the TensorFlow deep-learning framework to create new applications for customers. It needed to respond to a growing trend: customers wanting to quickly find answers to questions on their own, without having to talk to a support agent. "We wanted to give customers more relevant answers as fast as possible, and we wanted to drive a self-service customer support model," said Soon-Ee Cheah, a data scientist at Zendesk. Zendesk met this challenge by leveraging deep learning – a popular branch of artificial intelligence (AI).

Facial recognition technology will change the world. Still emerging into the mainstream, facial recognition technology has the potential to reshape that way you interact with the fringes of both the digital and real world. For the uninitiated, facial recognition is a biometric technology that scans people's face, photographs and recognizes them as an individual. Impressively, the technology can identify facial features like the space between the eyes, the depth of the eyes sockets, the width of the nose, cheekbones and the jawline. This technology has been recently entered the mainstream with Apple's iPhone X facial recognition feature, but the appeal of facial recognition goes beyond just consumer goods, and will eventually be an integral part of security.

LONDON: Artificial intelligence is set to swell the GCC and Egypt's economies to the tune of $320 billion by 2030, according to a report.Globally, the economic uplift could be to the magnitude of $15.7 trillion, more than the current output of China and India combined, according to a report by professional services firm PwC. Within that increase, $6.6 trillion is likely to come from increased productivity, while $9.1 trillion is likely to come from benefits to consumers....