If you heard about AlphaGo's latest exploits last week -- crushing the world's best Go player and confirming that artificial intelligence had mastered the ancient Chinese board game -- you may have heard the news delivered in doomsday terms. There was a certain melancholy to Ke Jie's capitulation, to be sure. The 19-year-old Chinese prodigy declared he would never lose to an AI following AlphaGo's earthshaking victory over Lee Se-dol last year. To see him onstage last week, nearly bent double over the Go board and fidgeting with his hair, was to see a man comprehensively put in his place. But focusing on that would miss the point.

A chess-playing robot stole the show as Asia's largest tech fair kicked off in Taiwan with artificial intelligence center stage. The annual Computex trade show in Taipei comes as Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen seeks to boost the island's economy with her'Asian Silicon Valley' project, nurturing startups and attracting investments from major international companies. The full-sized robot was one of the many gadgets that impressed visitors this week, along with a VR backpack that lets the user move around and a new VR headset. A chess-playing robot (pictured) stole the show as Asia's largest tech fair kicked off in Taiwan with artificial intelligence center stage Chess playing robot uses an intelligent vision system to interpret the visual world, act on visual information and learn from experience. The robot was able to play chess with attendees and fill coffee at various fill levels while the coffee cup is at random locations. Hong Kong firm Zotac displayed its VR backpack that lets the user move around without fear of tripping over connecting wires while playing a video game.

Terence Broad's Blade Runner sometimes looks a lot like the classic 1982 film. Sometimes it looks completely different. His autoencoded version of Blade Runner is the film as a computer sees it – or, more specifically, as a computer sees it, remembers it, and then regurgitates it. The film is being shown as part of the Barbican's science fiction exhibition-meets-festival, Into The Unknown. And it's perhaps the most cutting edge of all the work featured there – not only being about science fiction, but being created in a way that sounds like it comes straight out of the work of Philip K Dick.

BlessU-2, the name of the robot priest in Germany, can give blessings in five languages and beams light from its hands. The bot was created in honor of Martin Luther, the Guardian reported Tuesday. Five hundred years ago, revolutionary printing presses helped spread the word of the Protestant Reformation. The robot was configured by the Protestant church in Hesse and Nassau in Wittenberg, Germany, half a millennium after Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a church door. The creators wanted to ignite a conversation about how artificial intelligence could possibly be a part of religion's future.

It's been awhile since we've heard about Laundroid, the laundry folding robot that will make lazy people swoon. Now, parent company Seven Dreamers has announced a new partnership that could make your laundry-related life even easier. Seven Dreamers is partnering with Cerevo, a company that focuses on IoT and connected devices in Japan and across the world, to bring voice control technology to Laundroid. But there's a catch: As of the announcement date, it won't work with Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant or any other widely used voice control service. Instead, Laundroid will only work with Cerevo's Lumigent, a desk lamp that responds to voice control.

San Francisco: Jensen Huang, co-founder, president and chief executive officer of Santa Clara-based Nvidia Corp., says that the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing and computer vision augur well for the growth prospects of his company. His confidence stems from the fact that Nvidia designs the chips that can deliver the extra computing power that clients need in an algorithm-driven world, which is increasingly using these AI technologies to make business sense of the voluminous data that users generate and thus gain a competitive edge. These chips, called graphics processing units (GPUs), helped Nvidia fuel the growth of the personal computer gaming market almost two decades back. Huang hopes the increasing use of GPUs for AI will help his company repeat the success. Huang argues that even when you increase the number of central processing unit transistors in a computer, they result in a small increase in application performance, whereas GPUs, which are specifically designed to handle multiple tasks simultaneously, make them more suitable for high-performance computing tasks.

WhatsApp's biggest new feature is proving surprisingly popular, and has already eclipsed Snapchat. WhatsApp Status launched in February as an imitation of Snapchat Stories, letting you post customised photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours. It now has 175 million daily users, significantly more than Snapchat's 161 million, despite widespread bemusement when it was introduced earlier this year. Here's how to use WhatsApp Status. 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.

There's a rising chorus of concern about how quickly robots are taking away human jobs. Jobs are vanishing much faster than anyone ever imagined. In 2013, policy makers largely ignored two Oxford economists who suggested that 45% of all US jobs could be automated away within the next 20 years. But today that sounds all but inevitable. Those self-driving cars you keep hearing about are about to replace a lot of human workers.

This post originally appeared in early 2017, it is being republished as part of New Brunswick Innovation Week.] EhEye (pronounced AI) is a New Brunswick-based startup improving public safety and security via the use of artificially intelligent video analytics. The company's innovative software can automatically detect and extract objects, people, activities, and behaviours of interest from streaming video. CEO James Stewart recently returned from India where he participated in a federally-organized trade mission. An initiative of Global Affairs Canada via the High Commission of Canada in Delhi, the Smart Cities Mission brought Canadian companies to New Delhi and Bengaluru. We sat down with James to learn more.

Giant tech companies are fighting over the technology in court. Start-ups around the world are racing to develop new versions of it. And engineers say it is essential to making autonomous cars safe. The obscure object of desire: lidar. "We believe it will be the basis for autonomous driving," said Guillaume Devauchelle, who oversees innovation at Valeo, a major parts supplier to automakers.