Walking into the KFC restaurant in Beijing's financial district, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a fried chicken outlet like any other. It's only if you head right to the back corner of the shop that you realise you're actually in China's first smart restaurant. KFC has teamed up with Baidu – the search engine company often referred to as "China's Google" – to develop facial-recognition technology that can be used to predict customer's orders. Explaining the idea, a spokesperson for KFC said: "The artificial intelligence-enabled system can recommend menu items based on a customer's estimated age and mood." A press release from Baidu added that "a male customer in his early 20s" would be offered "a set meal of crispy chicken hamburger, roasted chicken wings and coke", while "a female customer in her 50s" would get a recommendation of "porridge and soybean milk for breakfast". So, steeled for some patronisingly gendered suggestions of salad or maybe a small portion of chips, I headed over to try the restaurant of the future for myself.

Not a day goes by without some fascinating new advance in deep learning, yet most of the conversation around deep learning in the cybersecurity realm has focused on its defensive capabilities, using AI algorithms to hunt through network and server logs to ferret out anomalous activity. This raises the fascinating question of what deep learning might be capable of as an offensive weapon of cyberwarfare. In the leadup to the US presidential election, the US Government proudly proclaimed that it had deployed its cyber warriors to burrow deep inside of Russian infrastructure systems in preparation for possible retaliatory strikes: "U.S. military hackers … penetrated Russia's electric grid, telecommunications networks and the Kremlin's command systems, making them vulnerable to attack by secret American cyber weapons should the U.S. deem it necessary." Such widespread infiltration likely took immense resources and preparation from a massive team of cyber experts. What if an organization like the NSA could instead simply fire up a deep learning algorithm, point it at the Kremlin and let the tool take it from there?

For the first time in many years, US companies clearly face a real change in sentiment and political risk in sending or keeping work offshore. It's clear that the new Trump administration combined with other secular forces – Brexit and the U.S. presidential campaign rhetoric, for example – signals a step back and pause in globalization. I think it's reasonable to believe that, to a larger extent than before, all directors in companies will be pressured to not use labor arbitrage and potentially pressured to repatriate work that has already been moved offshore. The problem this poses for companies is that executives have a fiduciary responsibility to their company. So far, president-elect Trump has gone after high-profile consumer goods companies and manufacturing companies.

First it was personal computers, then smartphones. Now the year's largest tech expo showed us what the next growth driver is: connected cars. At CES last week, tech giants like Microsoft, Intel and Nvidia showed off their latest plans for the fast-growing connected car market. Worldwide sales of connected car products is expected to increase almost fourfold between 2015 and 2020, according to a report by PwC's Strategy&, adding more than $149 billion in revenues in the passenger car segment alone. Some of the biggest bets have been by Samsung and Qualcomm.

Britain's top law enforcement official says it is legal to kill militants overseas if they pose an immediate or otherwise unstoppable threat. Attorney General Jeremy Wright is using a speech Wednesday to lay out the legal basis for the use of lethal force. Excerpts were released in advance. A Royal Air Force drone strike in Syria killed three Islamic State group fighters in 2015, including two Britons. It was the first such strike acknowledged by the British government.

South Korea's largest mobile operator SK Telecom (SKT) plans to invest KRW5 trillion ($4.1 billion) over the next three years to develop artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) technology and services. SKT said in a statement the investment strategy will focus on creating a "new ecosystem" for AI, self-driving cars and IoT, Yonhap news agency reported. Research will be coordinated with SKT's SK Broadband and SK Planet affiliates. A part of the investment will be allocated to support local start-ups, the operator said. At CES in Las Vegas last week, SKT said it held discussions with Samsung, Nvidia and Intel about cooperating on AI, connected cars and IoT initiatives, according to Yonhap.

Blazing the web for black-boxes to reverse-engineer, I came upon the following informative and down-to-earth article. I'm sharing it, as it hasn't found its way to the general public. The open-source AI trend represents the convergence of two trends: The open-source movement and the artificial intelligence revolution. The open-source movement is the trend toward making the source code for software available to developers and users so that anyone can modify it and, theoretically, improve it. Examples of open-source software include the Linux operating system, the Mozilla Firefox browser, and the Android mobile platform.

Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, and the Omidyar Network, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's nonprofit, have each committed $10 million to fund academic research and development aimed at keeping artificial intelligence systems ethical and preventing building AI that may harm society. The fund received an additional $5 million from the Knight Foundation and two other $1 million donations from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Jim Pallotta, founder of the Raptor Group. The $27 million reserve is being anchored by MIT's Media Lab and Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. The Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund, the name of the fund, expects to grow as new funders continue to come on board. Mossberg: Streaming TV is beginning to look a lot like cable Recode Daily: Spy chiefs warned Trump of a report that Russia has dirt on him Here's how to watch Donald Trump's first press conference since winning the election While AI has obvious benefits -- it can be used to scan through troves of data to detect cancer and automate driving to reduce fatalities -- a lot of very smart people, including the White House and Elon Musk's nonprofit Open AI, have warned how artificially intelligent systems can go awry.

Startup Intuition Robotics emerged from stealth today, announcing a social robot aimed at keeping older adults active and engaged. The design and actions of the artificial intelligence-based device, ElliQ, make it look and feel less like a traditional robot and more as a friendly and approachable digital companion. It is unveiled this week as part of the exhibition New Old: Designing for our Future Selves at The Design Museum in London and was developed in collaboration with famed industrial designer Yves Béhar and his studio, fuseproject. The world's advanced economies are facing today the challenge of responding to the needs of a rapidly aging population (about 15% of people in the United States and 26% in Japan are older than 65). Loneliness and social isolation are serious issues that sometimes accelerate specific health conditions and worsen the physical disabilities of older adults.

A ROBOT companion for older people aims to promote activity and tackle loneliness by nudging them to take part in digital and physical activities. A prototype of the ElliQ robot, made by Israel-based start-up Intuition Robotics, will be unveiled at the Design Museum in London this week. ElliQ is a small desktop device that consists of a stylised domed "body" and a separate detachable screen. Created in collaboration with Swiss designer Yves Béhar, the robot is able to tilt and turn to indicate what it is doing and encourage a degree of social engagement. Similar to home assistants like the Amazon Echo, people can simply talk to it, and there are visual cues that could be particularly helpful for those with hearing difficulties. A key purpose of ElliQ is to act as an easy interface to access existing services such as social media, messaging programs, and audio and video streaming.