A quick, hassle-free way to stay on top of robotics news, our robotics digest is released on the first Monday of every month. Sign up to get it in your inbox. February is only just gone, and already 2017 is shaping up to be a year full of big ideas and ambitions. The Future of Life Institute, for example, just published the Asilomar AI principles: 23 guidelines to ensure AI developments are beneficial to humanity. They are calling for shared responsibility and caution against an AI arms race.

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Facebook is trialling a "dislike" button for the first time, in response to high demand from users. The feature has been rolled out to a small number of people on the Messenger app, who now have the option to respond to individual messages. Facebook wants users to attach emojis to messages in a similar way to the "reactions" feature on the news feed. The social media giant had previously ignored calls for the "dislike" button due to fears the feature might be used as a form of bullying and would be unpopular with big brands. Facebook is however adamant this is more of a "no" button and it is being tested to see if the reaction is helpful for when group conversations need to vote, for instance.

Fujitsu today announced that it has received RIKEN's order for the "Deep learning system," which in terms of operations will be one of the largest-scale supercomputers in Japan specializing in AI research. The RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project will use the new system, scheduled to go online in April 2017, as a platform to accelerate R&D into AI technology. The system's total theoretical processing performance will reach 4 petaflops(1). The system will be comprised of two server architectures, with 24 of NVIDIA DGX-1 servers and 32 FUJITSU Server PRIMERGY RX2530 M2 servers, along with a high-reliability, high-performance storage system. Fujitsu is leveraging the extensive know-how that it and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. have in high-performance computing development and AI research to build and operate one of Japan's most advanced AI research systems.

IBM has taken its first step towards selling computers that are millions of times faster than the one you're reading this on. The company has set up a new division, IBM Q, that is intended to make quantum computers and sell them commercially. Until now, quantum computers have mostly been a much hyped but long away dream. But IBM believes they are close enough to reality to start work on getting software ready for when they become commercially available. 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.

Within the next five years, Google will produce a viable quantum computer. That's the stake the company has just planted. In the pages of Nature late last week, researchers from Google's Quantum AI Laboratory told the world that a machine leveraging the seemingly magical principles of quantum mechanics will soon outperform traditional computers on certain tasks. They said this long-anticipated technology will, among other things, improve the artificial intelligence that's already remaking the tech world. "The field of quantum computing will soon achieve a historic milestone," the team wrote.

Machine Intelligence (AI, ML and Deep Learning) requires a certain calibre of computer science talent. Today, this kind of talent is at the "top of the stack" of computer science. These cutting-edge capabilities used to be found at universities, and work on publicly-funded blue sky research; today, companies have the talent, and use it for private, applied purposes. The Economist touched on this in "Million Dollar Babies": That race for talent, is catalysing acquisitions by corporates interested in adding AI to their products and services. As an example, Ex-Googler Sebastian Thurn estimated that the going rate for self-driving engineering talent is $10 million per person.

A trio of university students is giving Indian startups unprecedented access to Silicon Valley. In April 2016, 20-year-old Abhinav Kukreja and two of his fellow freshman students at the University of California, Berkeley, Anish Prabhu, and Aryaman Dalmia, created an incubator called Moonshot that connects Indian startups with experts, funds, and talent from Silicon Valley. Its four-month program gives companies access to over 20 mentors in India and California, exposes them to various venture capitalists and angel investors, and provides interns. The first batch of startups Moonshot incubated last year included student benefits platform Frapp, marketplace ListUP, small-business cash-flow management startup Numberz, home appliance automation company Hombot, online B2B billing solutions portal Pumpcharge, and real estate and rental management service Azuro. For their second round in January 2017, Moonshot zeroed in on startups "advancing science and technology, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and companies that have a positive social impact," Kukreja, a computer science and statistics major, said.

In the 1970s, Moffett Federal Airfield, a government-operated military base that served as a test-bed for new technologies, had a high-security underground bunker. To enter, employees would have to walk through concrete hallways, past eerie metal doors and some guards. Inside, it was cold; the AC was always cranking. "It was straight out of 007 -- Dr. Evil kind of stuff," recalls Francis Jeffrey, who worked there at the time as an engineer. This subterranean lab was home to one of the world's first supercomputers, the ILLIAC.

Last week, Fortune magazine released "Here are 50 Companies Leading the AI Revolution," and the prestigious list includes three hot Israeli companies in the artificial intelligence sector: Logz.io, Fortune's infographic includes only six countries and features an equal number of notable AI companies from Israel (population 8.5 million) as China (population 1.38 billion) and the United Kingdom, and more than France and Taiwan. Only the United States has more companies on the graph. Fortune relied on research firm CB Insights' AI 100 list of the most promising artificial intelligence startups globally, based on factors like financing history, investor quality, business category and momentum. The CB Insights list also includes Israeli companies Prospera Technologies (ag-tech at work in Spain, Mexico and New York) and Chorus.ai