Ever since God created man, the Almighty has assured us of our sovereignty over the planet and control over all of its creatures. It is for this reason we fear the idea of aliens who may be more intellectually advanced than us or the emergence of intelligent machines that might think independently. Our fear of the appearance of those who surpass our intelligence is evident from the science fiction and futuristic films that speak about this subject (such as Terminator or Star Wars films). However, this fear of the emergence of entities that may surpass our intelligence has not stopped people from continuing to make machines that think for themselves. In America and Japan in particular, research is rapidly advancing towards this goal.

LG has just revealed that it will be showcasing its artificial intelligence solution for its upcoming high-end TVs at CES 2018 next week. The South Korean electronics company is also showing off its advanced image processor at the Las Vegas exhibition. On Wednesday, LG took to its online newsroom to announce its ThinQ AI and its new image processor for its upgraded OLED and SUPER UHD TVs. The main goal behind the first invention is to make it easier for consumers to interact and remotely control their televisions. On the other hand, the latter is designed to ensure that the picture quality and viewing experience of the new television screens will be unrivalled in the industry.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Beijing is planning to build a 13.8 billion yuan ($2.12 billion) artificial intelligence development park in the city's west, the official Xinhua news agency reported, as China pushes ahead to fulfill its ambition to become a world leader in AI by 2025. The AI park will house up to 400 enterprises and have an estimated annual output of 50 billion yuan, Xinhua said, citing a report from authorities in Beijing's Mentougou district. Zhongguancun Development Group, the developer of the project, will look to partner with foreign universities and build a "national-level" AI lab in the area, Xinhua added. Zhongguancun Development and representatives for Beijing's Mentougou district could not be immediately reached for comment. China's plan to fast-track AI development comes amid heightened tensions between Beijing and the United States over the competitive applications of AI in military technology.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Beijing is planning to build a 13.8 billion yuan ($2.12 billion) artificial intelligence development park in the city's west, the official Xinhua news agency reported, as China pushes ahead to fulfill its ambition to become a world leader in AI by 2025.

Credit Access is one of the fundamental enablers for faster economic growth and reduced income inequality. In India, the credit to GDP ratio stands around 50% which is significantly lower as compared to the developed economies and other BRICS nations. Today, approximately 525 million customers in India have no access to formal credit from regulated financial institutions. These individuals depend on informal mechanisms for saving and protecting themselves against risk. Insufficient credit history – Most of the unbanked consumers have either never taken a loan or have a thin file history.

Though the AI market is still at a nascent stage in India, companies are beginning to realize the advantages that this game-changing technology brings to today's hyper-competitive business scenario. All major industry verticals are experimenting with these third platform technologies, with IT & ITES and BFSI organizations leading the pack in India. Infosys, one of the key players in the $150 billion IT industry, has retrained 3,000 employees taking into account the value that AI brings to its business. BPO company Intelenet has implemented Robotic Process Automation for process efficiency and reduction in manual errors, leading to a 35% reduction in errors and a 10% increase in both revenue and employee productivity.

According to The Hindu Business Line the current 50,000 open data analytics jobs are expected to double to 100,000 this year. The Indian IT industry is expected to add around 180,000 to 200,000 new jobs in 2018. AI alone will create 2.3 million jobs globally by 2020, said Alka Dhingra, General Manager, IT staffing, TeamLease Services, a recruitment company. "The domestic IT job market is in a revival mode. Job seekers and techies with right skills will be in a'great' position to capitalise on this trend", said Ravi Kaklasaria, CEO & Co-Founder, SpringPeople, a corporate training and certification provider.

This article is part of Inc42's Startup Watchlist annual series where we list the top startups to watch for 2018 from industries like AI, IoT, Blockchain etc. Explore all the stories from'Startup Watchlist' series here. Once used as a tool for an application, Internet of Things (IoT) has become one of the widest ecosystems today. Currently at the centre stage of industries like energy management, healthcare, logistics, fintech, manufacturing and agritech, IoT, in convergence with AI, has the potential to disrupt all these verticals. Previously dictated by big players like IBM, Google, Intel, Cisco, Ericsson, Apple and Amazon, the IoT space has now become a startup ecosystem enabler across the world. While it was the Internet that drove the emergence of ecommerce startups in the early 2000s, IoT has been facilitating the growth of this decade's tech startups. What lightning does to mushrooms, IoT has done to startups!

Japan has a sex problem. The country's birthrate is shrinking year after year, to the point where deaths are outpacing births. Simply put, Japan's population is decreasing. But let's be clear: Population change is a complicated subject affected by many factors. A 2016 study by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in Japan, for instance, found that "almost 70 percent of unmarried men and 60 percent of unmarried women are not in a relationship."

As a kid, I saw the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes. As a future primatologist, I was mesmerized. Years later I discovered an anecdote about its filming: At lunchtime, the people playing chimps and those playing gorillas ate in separate groups. It's been said, "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't." And it can be vastly consequential when people are divided into Us and Them, ingroup and outgroup, "the people" (i.e., our kind) and the Others. The core of Us/Them-ing is emotional and automatic. Humans universally make Us/Them dichotomies along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, language group, religion, age, socioeconomic status, and so on. We do so with remarkable speed and neurobiological efficiency; have complex taxonomies and classifications of ways in which we denigrate Thems; do so with a versatility that ranges from the minutest of microaggression to bloodbaths of savagery; and regularly decide what is inferior about Them based on pure emotion, followed by primitive rationalizations that we mistake for rationality. But crucially, there is room for optimism. Much of that is grounded in something definedly human, which is that we all carry multiple Us/Them divisions in our heads. A Them in one case can be an Us in another, and it can only take an instant for that identity to flip. Thus, there is hope that, with science's help, clannishness and xenophobia can lessen, perhaps even so much so that Hollywood-extra chimps and gorillas can break bread together.