Honda Motor Co. reported Friday a ¥95.9 billion ($864 million) profit for January-March, a turnaround from the ¥93.4 billion loss it racked up a year earlier, as the automaker recovers from costs for a massive air bag recall. Quarterly sales rose 2.9 percent to ¥3.76 trillion ($33.9 billion) from ¥3.66 trillion. The performance exceeded forecasts by analysts at FactSet. Tokyo-based Honda, which makes the Accord sedan, Odyssey minivan and Asimo robot, said an unfavorable exchange rate and research spending that chipped away at profits were offset by lower recall expenses and cost cuts. Honda is the biggest customer of Japanese air bag maker Takata Corp., which is recalling millions of defective air bags whose inflators can explode with too much force, spewing shrapnel. For the fiscal year through March, Honda posted a ¥616.5 billion ($5.6 billion) profit, up dramatically from ¥344.5 billion the previous fiscal year, and better than the company or analyst forecasts.

People often ask me whether human-level artificial intelligence will eventually become conscious. My response is: Do you want it to be conscious? I think it is largely up to us whether our machines will wake up. The mechanisms of consciousness--the reasons we have a vivid and direct experience of the world and of the self--are an unsolved mystery in neuroscience, and some people think they always will be; it seems impossible to explain subjective experience using the objective methods of science. But in the 25 or so years that we've taken consciousness seriously as a target of scientific scrutiny, we have made significant progress.

Companies from Singapore to Finland are racing to improve artificial intelligence so software can automatically spot and block videos of grisly murders and mayhem before they go viral on social media. None, so far, claim to have cracked the problem completely. A Thai man who broadcast himself killing his 11-month-old daughter in a live video on Facebook this week, was the latest in a string of violent crimes shown live on the social media company. The incidents have prompted questions about how Facebook's reporting system works and how violent content can be flagged faster. A dozen or more companies are wrestling with the problem, those in the industry say.

Fan Hui, the European Go champion, needed some fresh air. "I don't understand myself anymore." Hui was the first professional Go player to face AlphaGo, Google's artificial intelligence system and the title of a new documentary by Greg Kohs that debuted last week at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. When Hui was invited to visit Google's London office housing the DeepMind research group that developed AlphaGo, he was feeling confident. After all, as Hui puts it, "it is just a program."

Robots are likely to replace 50 percent of all jobs in the next decade, according to Kai-Fu Lee, founder of venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures and a top voice on tech in China. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the wave of the future, the influential technologist told CNBC, calling it the "singular thing that will be larger than all of human tech revolutions added together, including electricity, [the] industrial revolution, internet, mobile internet -- because AI is pervasive." "It is the decision engine that will replace people," Lee said, adding that AI capabilities far exceed those of humanity. For example, he said, companies in which his firm has invested can accomplish feats such as recognizing 3 million faces at the same time, or dispersing loans in eight seconds. "These are things that are superhuman, and we think this will be in every industry, will probably replace 50 percent of human jobs, create a huge amount of wealth for mankind and wipe out poverty," Lee said, later adding that he expected that displacement to occur in the next 10 years.

Troubled by something deeply unethical going on at work? Or maybe you're plotting to leak sensitive information on the company that just sacked you? Either way, you best think twice before making your next move because an all-seeing artificial intelligence might just be analysing every email you send, every file you upload, every room you scan into – even your coffee routine. The latest wave of cyber-defence technology employs machine learning to monitor use of the ever-expanding number of smart household objects connected to the Internet of Things – shutting down hackers before they've broken into corporate databases or whistleblowers before they've forwarded on information to the media. One of the leading proponents is cyber-defence company Darktrace, founded in 2013 by former British intelligence officers in Cambridge and today featuring 370 employees in 23 offices globally.

BENGALURU: Three computer science dropouts from BITS Pilani in Goa, who founded a tech startup with the aim to create India's first virtual reality operating system, are developing an artificial intelligence engine that can create interactive content for games at a faster pace and with minimal human intervention. The team, which started Absentia in early 2015, worked for three years to integrate virtual reality technology with digital video content for brands and created its own headset, similar to the Oculus Rift virtual reality system. It is now building and testing the artificial intelligence product called Norah AI. In simple terms, Norah AI is a bot that can create game designs and structures in response to simple commands. These include machine-generated storylines, dialogues, characters, weapons and varied game scenes based on text or pictorial inputs.

Troubled by something deeply unethical going on at work? Or maybe you're plotting to leak sensitive information on the company that just sacked you? Either way, you best think twice before making your next move because an all-seeing artificial intelligence might just be analysing every email you send, every file you upload, every room you scan into – even your coffee routine. The latest wave of cyber-defence technology employs machine learning to monitor use of the ever-expanding number of smart household objects connected to the Internet of Things – shutting down hackers before they've broken into corporate databases or whistleblowers before they've forwarded on information to the media. One of the leading proponents is cyber-defence company Darktrace, founded in 2013 by former British intelligence officers in Cambridge and today featuring 370 employees in 23 offices globally.

PARIS – Translators play a vital role in saving the world's languages, their work allowing 6,000 to 7,000 spoken tongues to exist, and 3,000 rare dialects to survive. "Without translation, there is no history of mankind," said linguist Astrid Guillaume, of the Sorbonne University in Paris. "We know histories and cultures of the world only by way of translations," she added. The word "translate" comes from the Latin "traducere," which means "to carry across." Here are three examples of how translators serve linguistic diversity.

Could advances in technology, genetics and artificial intelligence lead to a world in which economic inequality turns into biological inequality? asks the historian and writer Yuval Noah Harari. Hunter-gatherers were more equal than subsequent societies. They had very little property, and property is a pre-requisite for long-term inequality. In the 19th and 20th Centuries, however, something changed. Equality became a dominant value in human culture, almost all over the world.