Vik Singh's company has powerful artificial intelligence software that helps firms hunt down the best sales leads. Getting somebody to use it--well, that's a story that says a lot about the U.S. expansion. U.S. businesses have every incentive to adopt labor-saving technologies, replacing factory workers with robots and desk jobs with smart software. In some areas, such as finance, machine decision-making is advancing quickly. In others, there are obstacles.

Self-driving car startup Faraday Future will back away from plans to build a $1 billion assembly factory in Las Vegas amid continuing financial problems for the company. In a statement via the Nevada Independent, Faraday Future chief financial officer Stefan Krause said the startup will focus on other quicker ways to reach its production goals. "We have decided to put a hold on our factory at the Apex site in North Las Vegas," Krause said. "We remain committed to the Apex site in Las Vegas for long-term vehicle manufacturing." For Faraday, the shift in plans for one of its flagship initiatives is a significant step back for the company.

Numerai is a hedge fund that's using technology to create an unprecedented network effect, and transform the way money is managed. Crowdsourced investment strategies are many and varied, but Numerai crowdsources machine intelligence in a totally unique way by supplying its network of data scientists with encrypted data on which to test their machine learning models, thus removing any bias attached to the application of the algorithms. These models are entered into a monthly tournament and the best ones receive a pay-out. This was previously done using Bitcoin (because it was efficient and more anonymous than PayPal), but more recently Numerai launched its own token, Numeraire (NMR), on Ethereum, the public blockchain which has spawned a multitude of trustless, decentralized applications. The aim of the token was to create more value for Numerai's growing network of scientists, and further align them with the collaborative goals of the project.

Most of us regard self-driving cars, voice assistants, and other artificially intelligent technologies as revolutionary. For the next generation, however, these wonders will have always existed. AI for them will be more than a tool; in many cases, AI will be their co-worker and a ubiquitous part of their lives. If the next generation is to use AI and big data effectively – if they're to understand their inherent limitations, and build even better platforms and intelligent systems -- we need to prepare them now. That will mean some adjustments in elementary education and some major, long-overdue upgrades in computer science instruction at the secondary level.

Much of the focus on artificial intelligence has been on the impact that task automation will have on jobs. While PwC expects that the nature of jobs will change and that some will be susceptible to automation, their newest research, Sizing the prize, shows that AI-driven products and services will also generate significant economic value, offsetting job gains, as well as boosting productivity and average wage levels. Organisations still need to develop approaches to embed AI responsibly into our workplaces and to secure the right talent to make the most of the opportunities created. MARGINALIA spoke with PwC's AI Programme Leader, Rob McCargow (pictured right), to explore the key findings from their new report. McCargow is deeply involved in the IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems, and so shares important ethical considerations and advice around how to maximise AI efforts in a way that benefit the enterprise, its people, and the society.

However, we often get a little ahead of ourselves. Oftentimes the promise isn't fulfilled as soon or as well as we imagined or vapored forth. Here is my list of stuff that may be good, but perhaps isn't all that it's cracked up to be as of mid-2017. It is ironic that I'd call chatbots a bit overhyped given that I work for a search company (full disclosure: I work for Lucidworks, a search technology firm with products in this area). I don't mean to say that NLP and conversational search and such don't have a very bright future, but chatbots will only be useful as an interface to a search engine--as the thing that asks follow-up questions to refine your search to find exactly what you're looking for.

Amazon Prime Day is off to a slow start for gadget fans. The company has sent its first batch of highly anticipated deals live, but there isn't a huge deal for consumers to choose from yet. Amazon's Echo deal is definitely the best we've spotted so far. If you're in the market for a new pair of headphones, you can get the B&O PLAY BeoPlay H6 second-gen over-ear headphones in black leather for £135. They were previously available from Amazon for £180.10, and have an RRP of £239.

AI is seen as a key to unlocking big data and the Internet of Things. It allows us to make better decisions faster and will soon enable smarter cities, self-driving cars, personalized medicines, and other new commercial applications that could potentially help solve various global problems. The field of AI is going through a period of rapid progress, with improvements in processor design and advances in machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. China has invested massively in AI research since 2013, and these efforts are yielding incredible results. China's AI pioneers are already making great strides in core AI fields.

Last August, Masahide Sasaki and his team instructed a satellite to shoot laser beams at a suburb of Tokyo. The laser beam, made of infrared light, was invisible to the human eye. By the time it had traveled through hundreds of miles of outer space and atmosphere, the light was harmless: It had spread out like a spotlight, about as wide as 10 soccer fields. Some of that light made its way into the end of a telescope, where it bounced off mirrors and flew through lenses and filters onto a photon-measuring detector. Someday, Sasaki hopes, that light could be more than invisible wavelengths hitting a telescope--it could be encoded with information.

An international partnership on cybersecurity can mean many things--it can mean mutual assistance with enforcement and criminal investigations, or sharing threat information and intelligence, or jointly developing software that can be used to target adversaries' computer systems, or even jointly developing tools and techniques that can be used to detect and mitigate threats. An "impenetrable" unit hints most closely at the last of these functions--a defensive joint effort in which the two countries share not just intelligence but also technical expertise and controls to protect their systems against intruders. But people who help design and implement your defenses then know an awful lot about the way your systems work and how, precisely, they are protected. Possibly, they're even writing code and giving it to you to download on your computers to help make them more impenetrable. And if that code also created backdoors on every computer it was installed on so that Russia had easy access to control those systems, who would be surprised?