The idea of a fully automated grocery store with no human employees might sound strange (or very appealing, depending on just how much you hate interacting with people), and now, Shanghai residents can visit one for themselves. The Swedish company Wheelys is testing a mobile grocery store with no staff -- and it can drive itself. In order to shop at Moby, you first have to download an app to your phone. That's what gets you through the door, which is otherwise kept locked. You then walk through the store -- which is very small, fitting a maximum of four people at once -- and place your purchases into a smart basket.

In 1950, Isaac Asimov imagined a future in which sentient robots are built to serve and protect humans, but end up doing the opposite. Almost seven decades later, that scenario has become much more prescient as artificial intelligence and robotics technologies bring us closer to a world of helpful, servile automatons. Now, Detroit: Become Human, a narrative adventure from experimental studio Quantic Dreams is the latest work to imagine the consequences of relying on such super smart machines. Set several years in the future, the game takes place in a world where androids have taken over most menial tasks and humans are figuring out what to do with all their leisure time. The major manufacturer of replicants, CyberLife, says its machines are safe and under control, and everyone is happy to trust them.

Microsoft is rolling out an update to its AI-powered photo editing app, Microsoft Pix, that aims to give Prisma and others like it some new competition. While the app was originally designed to enhance your iPhone photos by tweaking things like color, exposure and other variables, the newly updated Microsoft Pix will now let you have a little more fun with your photos, too – this time, by turning them into art. Similar to Prisma, the new app introduces a feature called Pix Styles, which allows you to transform your photos into works of art, and use other effects. For example, one effect will make the picture look like it's on fire. These are not photo filters, to be clear – the styles actually transfer texture, pattern and tones to the photo, explains Microsoft.

Harry Chiang is a Financial Analyst at I Know First. "The big paradox here is that people think technology will lead to banking becoming more and more automated and less and less personalized, but what we've seen coming through here is the view that technology will actually help banking become a lot more personalized." Over the past few years, news articles have casually floated the term'Artificial Intelligence' around at an increasing rate. It's one of those buzzwords that somehow finds its way in to every tech-related conversation. Even the least tech-savvy person has a vague notion of what it is. The problem is, some of the more tech-savvy person don't have a much clearer notion of what it is either. The definition of AI ranges and has vague boundaries.

When Lewis Hamilton looked to his future in Formula One in 2012 and decided to leave McLaren, the team with whom he had grown up and won his first world championship, it was roundly questioned at the time. After securing two further titles for Mercedes, the move was regarded as inspired but predicting what is round the corner in motor racing has never been easy and, with F1 having just begun the process of reinvention under its new owners, the future is very much on the agenda. Many sports have faced new challenges and opportunities because of the extraordinary changes technological advances have wrought in the past two decades. But that is true of F1 perhaps more than most, having stuck with a long outdated model that has increasingly failed to engage with a younger audience. If F1 and motor racing in general are to survive, doing so is crucial and it seems it is at the crossroads between the virtual world and the real that it is most likely to happen.

Chances are pretty high that you've talked to a chatbot at least once in your life. If you've ever asked Siri a question, gone shopping through Kik, or requested directions from Cortana, you've stepped into the world of chatbots. And while chatbots are great for consumers, they're downright AMAZING for brands. Bots fulfil all kinds of roles in the business world, such as facilitating team communication, making your products easy to find and purchase for your customers, and even smoothing out customer service concerns. And yes--even start-ups can tap into this awesome potential.

India's largest eye care provider, Aravind Eye Hospital, has been quietly working for over four years with Google on a project to use artificial intelligence (AI) in ophthalmology. Aravind Eye Hospital, which has branches across India, is headquartered in Madurai, Tamil Nadu. Lily Peng, product manager at Google, who released a paper on the research a year ago, said at the 2017 WIRED Business Conference that Google had just finished a clinical study in India, and that work was underway to get the technology into routine use with patients. India, considered the diabetes capital of the world, has over 70 million diabetes patients who are at risk of blindness due to the disease. India's largest eye care provider, Aravind Eye Hospital, has been quietly working for over three to four years with Google on a project to use artificial intelligence in ophthalmology At the TensorFlow Dev Summit earlier this year, Peng had said that that Google's machine learning algorithm was very close to an ophthalmologist in terms of performance.

Finance is something that no person on earth can live without. It is the basic necessity of life, as everybody needs money to eat, travel, and buy things. Although as technology gets smarter so do people. The present financial market is already comprised of humans as well as machines. People are finding more and more ways to default on loans, stealing money from others account, creating a fake credit rating etc. Today, machine learning plays an integral role in many phases of the financial ecosystem. From approving loans, to managing assets, to assess risks.

It was a hectic but interesting week at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Singapore. Computer/robotic vision and navigation-related (SLAM, localization) are still some of the most popular, or at least well-attended fields at these conferences. My colleagues said that some of the manipulation / grasping sessions were well attended too. The influence and growth in machine learning / deep learning seems to have slowed somewhat. This is possibly related to the fact we're increasingly seeing some of the best robotics learning work going to machine learning or computer vision conferences, or potentially to new conferences like the Conference on Robot Learning.

Line Corp. said Thursday it plans to focus more on artificial intelligence, saying AI-related services will be the next big thing after the smartphone boom. "Because of the smartphone trend, Line was born and we have grown this far. But looking at five or 10 years from now, what comes after the smartphone era? It's the era of AI," said Jun Masuda, Line's chief strategy and marketing officer, at a news conference in Tokyo, where the company disclosed its strategy going forward. The Tokyo-based messaging-app giant said the new core service it is developing will be called Clova, an internet-based AI system or "virtual assistant."