Autonomous cars will dominate the streets by 2022, according to Nissan-Renault-Mitsubishi Alliance Chairman Carlos Ghosn. The firm, which has an established autonomous car program, wants to give drivers control of their cars; their autonomous cars are not driverless cars -- instead, drivers can decide when they want to drive and when they want the car to drive for them. Ghosn says that autonomous cars provide a "huge advantage" for drivers, and as a result, the industry will have "massive growth" in the coming years. Instead of focusing on the road for hours at a time, people can "rest … relax … see a movie" while the car does its work for them. With autonomous cars featured heavily in news reports -- and even spotted in several testing-ground locations in the United States -- the hype surrounding autonomous cars begs the question: when will we see autonomous cars on the road?

Laparoscopy is a surgical technique in which a fiber-optic camera is inserted into a patient's abdominal cavity to provide a video feed that guides the surgeon through a minimally invasive procedure. Laparoscopic surgeries can take hours, and the video generated by the camera -- the laparoscope -- is often recorded. Those recordings contain a wealth of information that could be useful for training both medical providers and computer systems that would aid with surgery, but because reviewing them is so time consuming, they mostly sit idle. Researchers at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital hope to change that, with a new system that can efficiently search through hundreds of hours of video for events and visual features that correspond to a few training examples. In work they presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation this month, the researchers trained their system to recognize different stages of an operation, such as biopsy, tissue removal, stapling, and wound cleansing.

Now select users will get to test it. One of the most anticipated new features of the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 prior to the phone's launch in March was an artificial intelligence assistant named Bixby that you were supposed to be able to control by voice. Unfortunately while some of Bixby's capabilities made into onto the phones, the voice-based commands that would make Bixby respond more like the Google Assistant, Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Alexa was delayed, at least in the U.S. (Bixby is fully operational in South Korea, where Samsung is based). On Friday, Samsung Electronics America announced it will give "select" Galaxy S8 and S8 users early access to Bixby's vocal capabilities as part of what it still considered an early preview test. Samsung hasn't disclosed how many Bixby testers will gain access to this sneak preview, which will let you hold down a Bixby button and start speaking to get the phone to send texts, change settings and make calls.

A new book suggests the iPhone almost ended up as a BlackBerry clone. Here's why we should be grateful it didn't work out like that If you've ever used a BlackBerry, you'll know that most of them have physical keyboards on them – although even BlackBerry seems to moving away from that model for many of its latest handsets. The BlackBerry QWERTY keyboards are easy to use, and fast typing is a breeze. So it's no surprise that Apple considered putting one on the first iPhone, right? Except it really doesn't seem likely.

Just decades ago, artificial intelligence (AI) was limited to the realm of science fiction, awaiting the potent mix of huge pools of data and cheap, readily accessible supercomputing power to unleash its true potential. More than just technology buzzwords, AI and machine learning today are augmenting human abilities, enabling us to better harness our innate creativity to solve complex problems and discover new ways of doing things. In this e-guide, find out how financial institutions are using AI-powered chatbots to serve customers, what AI means for the future of work and how one Singapore-based startup is using declassified military methodologies to produce data-driven insights.

We're in the midst of a wave of excitement around AI such as hasn't been seen for a few decades. But those previous periods of inflated expectations led to troughs of disappointment. Will this time be different? Applications of AI such as predictive analytics are already decreasing costs and improving reliability of industrial machinery. Furthermore, the funding and research going into AI now comes from a wide range of commercial firms.

Marketers are increasingly using more channels to reach customers, pondering their strategy for artificial intelligence and augmenting email, which delivers solid returns, with new technologies. Those takeaways were among the highlights of a survey conducted by Salesforce. Executives walked through the findings with a customer at Salesforce's New York office. Salesforce's State of Marketing Report is based on a survey of 3,500 marketing pros in the US, Canada, Brazil, Ireland, the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. The survey was based on Salesforce customers, but likely applies to a broader set of marketing professionals.

YouTube appears to have broken – but only for some people. Many people are reporting that they can't get onto the site, and can't watch videos there. But for others, pages loaded fine. It's not clear what is deciding whether the site and app is working or not. Problems usually happen for everyone if they happen at all, or are isolated to specific locations and servers.

Since the plagues of the Old Testament, we have contemplated the Apocalypse, the world rising in vengeance as men, women and children scurry across the brutal landscape of a lost paradise. Our doomsday stories and how they scroll and flash before us have changed since the parchment days of the Bible. But we remain fascinated by the specter of our demise, whether the end is wrought by deities, our own folly or imposed by outside forces like monsters, asteroids and aliens that have haunted us since Orson Welles' 1938 "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast. Few of our dystopias, however, are as frightening as the planet gone asunder, polluted and destroyed by humanity's amorality, recklessness and greed. Film and literature -- to say nothing of our private insecurities -- resound with a world that freezes, boils, chokes, cracks with earthquakes, dwindles with resources and succumbs to pestilence and disease.

Business Intelligence is one of the oldest concepts in data processing. Though it was first coined by Richard Millar Devens in 1865 in the Cyclopædia of Commercial and Business Anecdotes, mining transactional data for business insights has been popular since the 90s. Today, Business Intelligence tools are systems that enable companies to collect, store, access, and analyse enterprise data to allow for efficient decision-making and strategic predictive intelligence for planning. Businesses can also leverage predictive models to help detect patterns in transactional and historical data in order to identify risks and take advantage of the opportune potential of different aspects of machine learning. In the 1990s, the BI business flourished when improved and powerful graphics on PCs entered the market and it became a $17 Bn industry last year.