IBM launched its IBM Watson for Cyber Security program in beta on Tuesday, and announced that it already has 40 clients signed up, including global leaders in the banking and insurance industries. Companies like Sun Financial and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation will test the ability of Watson -- IBM's artificial intelligence (AI) -- to identify and fight cyberattacks. Watson will help them more easily identify specific malware programs and provide background on known cybercrime campaigns, as well as more accurately pinpoint suspicious behavior. At the same time, Watson will better learn how to interpret cybersecurity data and improve its analytical capabilities. One problem the program aims to solve is a lack of accessible information on past cyberattacks.

The rush to automate manual labor jobs has reached new heights in convenience stores. Self-service checkouts are hardly new, but Panasonic and Lawson have taken them one step further in Japan. The pair has developed a basket system which can detect the items you're placing inside and then, once you've reached the till, bag them up automatically. It's an elaborate concept -- the bottom of the basket slides out, allowing your chosen goods to carefully fall into a bag underneath. The basket then slides away from you, creating a space to pick up the bag and walk out.

A major Italian government agency offers a good example of how AI can dovetail with the work people do and enable them to be more effective. Employees there were spending the majority of their time attending to routine customer queries. The agency worked with Accenture to automate the process with AI. An intelligent Virtual Agent application now handles real-time voice calls and webchat interactions, using a combination of cognitive-semantic analysis and machine-learning algorithms. After just three months, the Virtual Agent application has already successfully served more than 70,000 users.

The year 2017 is predicted to be that of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning -- redefining the way humans communicate with devices to not only improve daily life but also boost businesses, even in India. To make this happen, here comes IBM Watson -- a cognitive system enabling a new partnership between people and computers. Named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, the supercomputer combines AI and analytical software for optimal performance as a "question answering" machine that thinks like a human. For IBM, cognitive is digital business plus digital intelligence. With Watson, people can analyse and interpret all of their data, including unstructured text, images, audio and video.

In the summer of 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned a group of thirty-six scholars to write a secret history of the Vietnam War. The project took a year and a half, ran to seven thousand pages, and filled forty-seven volumes. Only a handful of copies were made, and most were kept under lock and key in and around the Beltway. One set, however, ended up at the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, where it was read, from start to finish, by a young analyst there named Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was dismayed by what he learned. For a generation, the U.S. government had been lying to the American people about the Vietnam War. He put the first of the volumes in his briefcase, praying that the security guards at RAND would not stop him, and made his way to a small advertising agency in West Hollywood, where a friend told him there was a Xerox machine he could use. "It was a big one, advanced for its time, but very slow by today's standards," Ellsberg writes in his 2002 autobiography, "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers": It could do only one page at a time, and it took several seconds to do each page. I tried pressing the book down on the glass to do two pages at a time, but the middle section was faint and uneven. Fortunately the books were bound with metal tapes through holes so they could be taken apart. . . . The machine didn't collate, and the bar had to come back and travel just as slowly for each copy.

There are many accounts of the genesis of Watson. The most popular, which is not necessarily the most accurate--and this is the sort of problem that Watson himself often stumbled on--begins in 2004, at a steakhouse near Poughkeepsie. One evening, an I.B.M. executive named Charles Lickel was having dinner there when he noticed that the tables around him had suddenly emptied out. Instead of finishing their sirloins, his fellow-diners had rushed to the bar to watch "Jeopardy!" This was deep into Ken Jennings's seventy-four-game winning streak, and the crowd around the TV was rapt. Not long afterward, Lickel attended a brainstorming session in which participants were asked to come up with I.B.M.'s next "grand challenge." The firm, he suggested, should take on Jennings.

On December 2nd, 1942, a team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi came back from lunch and watched as humanity created the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction inside a pile of bricks and wood underneath a football field at the University of Chicago. Known to history as Chicago Pile-1, it was celebrated in silence with a single bottle of Chianti, for those who were there understood exactly what it meant for humankind, without any need for words. Now, something new has occurred that, again, quietly changed the world forever. Like a whispered word in a foreign language, it was quiet in that you may have heard it, but its full meaning may not have been comprehended. However, it's vital we understand this new language, and what it's increasingly telling us, for the ramifications are set to alter everything we take for granted about the way our globalized economy functions, and the ways in which we as humans exist within it. The language is a new class of machine learning known as deep learning, and the "whispered word" was a computer's use of it to seemingly out of nowhere defeat three-time European Go champion Fan Hui, not once but five times in a row without defeat.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be the single most disruptive technology the world has seen since the Industrial Revolution. Granted, there is a lot of hype out there on AI, along with doomsday headlines and scary movies. But the reality is that it will positively and materially change how we engage with the world around us. It's going to improve not only how business is done, but the kind of work we do – and unleash new levels of creativity and ingenuity. In fact, research from Accenture estimates that artificial intelligence could double annual economic growth rates of many developed countries by 2035, transforming work and fostering a new relationship between humans and machines.

Regarding Fear and Artificial Intelligence (AI), one question often comes up:'Will we be killed by a Terminator Doppelganger?' I don't know if this will happen eventually, but I do know that we already have robots fighting our wars. This century is therefore, the first time in human history that we engage in Unmanned Warfare. What is the current status of this'Unmanned Warfare'? What do people think about drone strikes and will terminators be the next step?

MANILA, Philippines – This is not a phone conversation or a chat session with a customer service representative. Alexa is the digital voice assistant residing inside Amazon's wifi-enabled, voice-controlled smart speakers Amazon Echo and Amazon Echo Dot. Her capabilities go beyond rattling off the day's news or the weather, or playing music. She can order pizza, shoes, jewellery or even an Uber ride (at least in the US). You can ask her to turn on or off your TV, the lights or adjust the temperature in your room (provided you have a connected home).