For all of modern gaming's advances, conversation is still a fairly unsophisticated affair. Starship Commander, an upcoming virtual reality game on Oculus and SteamVR, illustrates both the promise and challenge of a new paradigm seeking to remedy that: using your voice. In an early demo, I control a starship delivering classified goods across treacherous space. Everything is controlled by my voice: flying the ship is as simple as saying "computer, use the autopilot," while my sergeant pops up in live action video to answer questions. At one point, my ship is intercepted and disabled by a villain, who pops onto my screen and starts grilling me. After a little back and forth, it turns out he wants a deal: "Tell you what, you take me to the Delta outpost and I'll let you live."

Artificial intelligence is completely reshaping the $445 billion beauty industry by creating AI-powered shopping experiences despite the widespread brick-and-mortar retail crisis. "Cracking e-commerce for beauty has been notoriously difficult compared to other verticals," Headliner Labs co-founder Caroline Klatt told International Business Times. "Getting a recommendation from a stylist is the number one driver of sales in stores." New York-based Headliner is just one of many companies creating custom AI chatbots for beauty brands. To understand just how dramatic this high-tech shift really is, let's recall how people got beauty products just 15 years ago.

With the market for robotics and artificial intelligence booming worldwide, how can industry leaders design principles and technical standards into their products that will benefit society as a whole? That was a key question debated at the World Economic Forum in Davos, yesterday. Among the panelists were IBM Chairman and CEO Virginia Rometty, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and MIT Media Lab Director Joichi Ito. Chairing the debate, CEO of Vista Equity Partners Robert F. Smith, said: We must bring a comprehensive and well-thought-out approach to managing the creative destruction that is inherent in embracing these ever-more-powerful tools, and frankly we must use these tools to repair the deficiencies in this capitalistic system and restore the social contract with the people on this planet. Bold words from a private equity firm with a $28 billion portfolio, and in Smith's view, AI has a central role to play in restoring that contract.

Nissan's next-generation Leaf EV will be its first car featuring its ProPilot driver-assist self-driving technology. The system will be activated by a button on the steering wheel and will control acceleration, braking and steering. The ProPilot system consists of a suite of assists, semi-autonomous functions and is designed mainly for highways, and not for busy city traffic. The company has been testing the system in Japan for some time and now and it is ready for a rollout in North America and Europe. "In the coming years, Nissan's ProPilot technology will offer increasing levels of autonomy, with the system eventually able to navigate city intersections. Set to help make driving more secure and more enjoyable, ProPilot Assist is part of Nissan Intelligent Mobility, the company's blueprint for transforming how cars are driven, powered and integrated into society," the company said in its press release Thursday.

Five months after President Donald Trump proclaimed "we are going to fight for every last American job" at a Boeing factory in South Carolina, the company announced Thursday it would be laying off "fewer than 200 people" at the North Charleston plant campus. "Our competition is relentless, and that has made clear our need as a company to reduce cost to be more competitive," Boeing said in a statement, Washington Post reported. During his visit to the company, Donald Trump said, "We're here today to celebrate American engineering and American manufacturing, we're also here today to celebrate jobs. Boeing employs about 140,000 workers in the United States, mostly in, California, Washington, Missouri and South Carolina, Washington Post reported. Lay offs at Boeing had been ongoing throughout this year, with over 400 employees already let go, reports said. Those however were from different Boeing plants. The plant where the president had visited and celebrated new jobs, saw layoffs for the first time this year. This is not the first time the airline company will be laying off employees. Boeing laid off more than 30,000 employees in 2001. Over the years, many renowned companies have cut jobs on a large scale. Boeing is not even the only company to lay off employees in big numbers. Here are some of the biggest corporate layoffs in U.S. history: In one of the biggest job cuts, IBM issued pink slips to 60,000 employees in 1993. IBM's core mainframe business was becoming obsolete with the arrival of personal computers. The company wanted to shift its focus on providing integrated solutions for its customers and CEO Louis Gerster had put aside $8.9 billion which led to the loss of 60,000 jobs. Citibank had 50,000 employees laid off in November, 2008. At that time, it was planning to start disinvestment. Addressing the employees, former CEO Vikram Pandit had said "There is nothing easy about these decisions and the impact on our people.

Ready or not, there are robots in your future. And some of them will be for health care. There has been growing concern that the rise of robots, along with artificial intelligence (AI), will create huge impacts on jobs. Within the last few months both McKinsey and PwC have issued white papers on the topic. The former found that nearly half of jobs have the potential to be automated (although most not totally), while the latter expects 38% of U.S. jobs at at high risk of automation within 20 years.

Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma, in an interview to CNBC, said the rising technological advancements in artificial intelligence could lead to World War III. Speaking to the news channel, the billionaire Chinese business magnate said there is a need for the world leaders to educate people about the pain that the rapid rise in automation and artificial intelligence will bring. "The first technology revolution caused World War I. The second technology revolution caused World War II. This is the third technology revolution," he said.

Laparoscopic surgeries are often automatically recorded from the point of view of the endoscope's lens. This is thanks to built-in recording equipment that accompanies many commercial endoscopic systems. What isn't easy is reviewing all those hours of footage to find something that may be useful for training clinicians or that may be used to improve laparoscopy-related equipment. Now researchers at MIT have reported at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Singapore on a new video processing system that can, on its own, identify different stages of laparoscopic surgeries, potentially allowing researchers to quickly find relevant scenes that they can easily study. The computer vision algorithm powering the system can spot when a biopsy is performed, a wound irrigated, or tissue stapled, among other activities.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti urges the public to ask their members of Congress to support continued federal funding of the earthquake early warning system. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti urges the public to ask their members of Congress to support continued federal funding of the earthquake early warning system. In this hyper-partisan era, there may be one issue that unites California Democrats and Republicans: Earthquakes. Elected officials from both parties have supported an earthquake early warning system for the West Coast that, after years of work, was scheduled to begin its first limited public operation next year. But President Trump's budget proposal calls for cuts that experts say would kill the warning network.

The passwords of thousands of British politicians, senior police officers and other top officials have been stolen and traded by hackers, it has been reported. The login details of education secretary Justine Greening and business secretary Greg Clark are believed to be some of those that were reportedly exchanged by Russian hackers. The head of IT at the Foreign Office, the director-general of the Department for Exiting the European Union and former detective chief inspector Andy Redwood were also reportedly affected. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.