Artificial intelligence is changing the world and doing it at breakneck speed. The promise is that intelligent machines will be able to do every task better and more cheaply than humans. Rightly or wrongly, one industry after another is falling under its spell, even though few have benefited significantly so far. And that raises an interesting question: when will artificial intelligence exceed human performance? More specifically, when will a machine do your job better than you? Today, we have an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Katja Grace at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford and a few pals.

LOS ANGELES, May 31 (Xinhua) -- "The ultimate power, in my opinion, is love, not AI," a top artificial intelligence (AI) expert and chief scientist of AI/ML (Google Cloud) Fei-Fei Li told Xinhua in a recent exclusive interview. In the Chinese language, the abbreviation of artificial intelligence, or AI, is pronounced the same as the character for "love." From the introduction of a second generation of its TensorFlow Processing Unit (TPU) to TensorFlow Research Cloud, almost all of Google's latest big announcements touched on AI in one way or another. Last year, the technology giant recruited Li, one of the most eminent women working on AI, to lead machine learning research for Google's cloud computing division. "Goal is to democratize AI for everyone!"

In a saturated eCommerce market, Chinese eCommerce giant Alibaba and its biggest competitor, Tencent Holdings Limited, have their eyes on diversification, and Alibaba is losing ground. Like their American counterpart Amazon, Alibaba and Tencent are fashioning themselves identities that have less and less to do with online shopping and more to do with an integrated life approach. Alipay, Alibaba's mobile payment platform, released a version in Hong Kong dollars this week. Previously, payments could only be made in yuan. Alibaba took an 18 percent stake in supermarket and convenience store operator Lianhua Supermarket Holdings, catapulting the company's stocks as much as 34 percent during Monday morning trading (May 29).

You can now link your iCloud Calendar to the Alexa voice assistant. Amazon has just rolled out the functionality to Alexa-compatible devices, describing it as "a top requested feature". The announcement should please iPhone, iPad and Mac users, who can now organise their calendar and quickly find out about their schedule by chatting to Alexa. 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.

Beyond membership in the Pantheon of Famous Brits, Winston Churchill and George Orwell would seem to have little in the way of common ground. Orwell was a journalist and novelist. Churchill had money and pedigree; the young Orwell lived on the street and raised his own vegetables during World War II. Churchill's political leanings were conservative; Orwell flirted with communism until he witnessed the betrayal of his Republican comrades by Soviet agents in the Spanish Civil War. In "Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom," Thomas E. Ricks gets beyond these differences and finds the iron core of both men.

On Wednesday, May 24, Dubai will launch a new police robot that marks the first phase of the integration of robots into the police force. This modified version of the REEM robot (Designed by PAL robotics and unveiled in 2011) is capable of feeding video to a command center, forwarding reported crimes to police, settling fines, facial recognition, and speaking nine languages. It will operate at most malls and tourist attractions. Dubai hopes robots will constitute 25 percent of its police force by 2030, with the next stage being to use them as receptionists in police stations. Brigadier Khalid Nasser Alrazooqi, General Director of Dubai Police's Smart Services Department, told CNN that they eventually want to release a "fully-functional robot that can work as [a] normal police officer."

The parents of a girl who died after being hit by a subway train have lost their appeal for access to her Facebook account. The 15-year-old died in Berlin in 2012, and her parents say they want to use her Facebook messages to work out if she was a victim of online bullying, and if she took her own life. Berlin's court of appeals has rejected their claim and ruled in favour of the social media site, which has repeatedly rejected their requests. 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.

The New York Times published a provocative article on Friday, asking in the headline "Is China outsmarting America in A.I.?". But depending on how you define "outsmarting," and the context in which the question is asked, the answer might not even matter much. The answer might matter very much in terms of geopolitics and national security. Just like with supercomputing, quantum computing and other areas of deep computer science research, having better capabilities in artificial intelligence can arguably lead to an edge in areas like military, energy and climate science that can shift the world-power balance. But if we're talking about consumer or enterprise AI, then comparing China and the United States is kind of like comparing apples and oranges.

There is a 50 per cent chance that machines will outperform humans in all tasks within 45 years, according to a survey of more than 350 artificial intelligence researchers. AI will master many activities a lot sooner, though. Machines are predicted to be better than us at translating languages by 2024, writing high-school essays by 2026, driving a truck by 2027, working in retail by 2031, writing a bestselling book by 2049 and surgery by 2053. In fact, all human jobs will be automated within the next 120 years, say respondents. The survey, by the University of Oxford and Yale University, was sent to AI researchers who published in 2015 at one of two big conferences in the field – the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems and the International Conference on Machine Learning. In total, 352 people responded.

Tube users could soon get phone signal underground, it's been reported. TfL is said to be in talks with telecommunications groups, and could offer full mobile coverage on London Underground after next week's general election. Commuters can already access the internet on sections of the tube network by connecting to Virgin Media's Wi-Fi service, but it isn't especially practical. 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.