Longtime photojournalist Max Aguilera-Hellweg's new collection of droid and anthropomorphic robot portraits, Humanoid, chornicles his fascinating journey through the United States and Japan to explore the evolution of robot science--the turning point where robots are crossing the great divide between data processing and sentience.

As Washington fiddles, China is investing billions in U.S. startups with cutting-edge products that could have military applications at the same time it is dialing back investments in less critical American industries such as entertainment. A New York Times story this week says that among the startups are companies working on artificial intelligence for military robots, rocket engines, ship sensors and printers that could produce high-tech components such as computer screens for military jets. Many of the firms making such investments are owned by companies controlled by the Chinese government or connected to its leaders. A blog post last December on the website of CB Insights, which tracks startup investments, says that China poured $9.9 billion into new Silicon Valley firms in 2015 and made an additional $3.5 billion in tech investments in the first nine months of last year. The number and size of those tech investments in startups developing military applications were not broken out.

Washington (AFP) - Are robots coming for your job? Although technology has long affected the labor force, recent advances in artificial intelligence and robotics are heightening concerns about automation replacing a growing number of occupations, including highly skilled or "knowledge-based" jobs. Just a few examples: self-driving technology may eliminate the need for taxi, Uber and truck drivers, algorithms are playing a growing role in journalism, robots are informing consumers as mall greeters, and medicine is adapting robotic surgery and artificial intelligence to detect cancer and heart conditions. Of 700 occupations in the United States, 47 percent are at "high risk" from automation, an Oxford University study concluded in 2013. A McKinsey study released this year offered a similar view, saying "about half" of activities in the world's workforce "could potentially be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies."

This post is based on my recent presentation at DevOps Summit Silicon Valley in November 2016. You can see the entire presentation here. We call it DevOps but much of the time there's a lot more discussion about the needs and concerns of developers than there is about other groups. There's a focus on improved and less isolated developer workflows. There are many discussions around collaboration, continuous integration and delivery, issue tracking, source code control, code review, IDEs, and xPaaS - and all the tools that enable those things.

Even six years after a nuclear crisis struck Fukushima in Japan, radiation levels at Fukushima continued to reach the extreme levels. While most of this data is collected through cameras and robots, there is now a shadow of doubt about the future of these robots. Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. (TEPCO), the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, failed to get a comprehensive report in its attempt to find nuclear debris in a containment vessel with the help of the PMORPH survey robot – developed by Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy and the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning (IRID) – on Thursday. This was the latest in the spate of robot failures in the process of decommissioning the plant. Last month, a Toshiba "scorpion" robot, built to tolerate up to 1,000 sieverts of radiation, was unable to withstand the high levels of nuclear toxicity in nuclear reactor No. 2. There have been a number of other instances, causing authorities to think of alternative approaches to the clean-up.

Everyone wants to use containers, but monitoring containers is hard. New ephemeral architecture introduces new challenges in how monitoring tools need to monitor and visualize containers, so your team can make sense of everything. In his session at @DevOpsSummit, David Gildeh, co-founder and CEO of Outlyer, will go through the challenges and show there is light at the end of the tunnel if you use the right tools and understand what you need to be monitoring to successfully use containers in your environments. Speaker Bio David Gildeh is a serial entrepreneur. He founded and sold his last startup, SambaStream, to Alfresco in 2011, thus launching their cloud business.

AI is having a huge impact on trading, wealth management and asset management. When I first graduated from Stanford, I'd tell people I have a degree in artificial intelligence and they would reply, "so, you are a science fiction writer?" I would then explain that I was an engineer who studied linguistics, cognition, statistics and algorithmic problem-solving. Today, AI is hot topic, and the entire financial industry is trying to find ways to leverage it. After a decade in quantitative finance, I decided to return home to AI and build a new kind of wealth management firm – even different from other robo-advisers.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is on the verge of becoming a'bubble' in China as a large influx of money and talent heat the market, analysts and experts warn. "For the job market in China's AI sector, I see a bubble already exists now. Some practitioners in the AI industry and are paid salaries that are unfairly high," said Wang Xiaochuan, chief executive officer of Chinese internet company Sogou. "Investors expect too high a return on their investments, and the valuations of China's AI enterprises are much more expensive than those in the US." In terms of investment in AI enterprises, China was in second place in 2016 on US$2.6 billion, followed by the UK on US$800 million, according to data from Chinese think tank WuZhen Institute.

I was meeting with the Tallahassee Chamber of Commerce's Communications Committee; there was some brainstorming about session ideas for the upcoming Chamber Conference. There were some thoughts thrown out, and quite a few comments were made. Then someone said, "how about automation and artificial intelligence." Suddenly, a surge of ideas and thoughts hit the room like a vicious uppercut from Mike Tyson circa 1999. All industries went into the mix: retail, auto, construction, medical and legal.

Samsung Electronics is taking on Google and Apple to grab the lion's share in the highly potential artificial intelligence (AI) industry. The Seoul-based tech behemoth confirmed this week that its upcoming flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S8, would be equipped with its new AI assistant, Bixby. Samsung is a latecomer in the AI industry, compared with its handset rivals such as Apple and Google. Google, for its part, is also seeking to expand its AI presence, backed by its dominant Android mobile operating system (OS), allowing Nougat 7.0 users to access its AI service, Google Assistant. Samsung, though, remains confident about its success in AI, largely due to its global influence as the world's largest consumer electronics manufacturer.