Ben Goertzel is one of the most respected figures in artificial intelligence, and one of the most colourful. Committed to creating an advanced form of artificial general intelligence that would genuinely simulate human consciousness, he has relocated to Hong Kong, where he receives financing from the government and oversees an international team of technologists. Now, he must present his investors with a child-like robot that would be a significant improvement on current technology.

One of China's leading tech companies is building an AI lab that could soon rival those operated by the likes of Google, Facebook, Baidu, and Amazon. Tencent, based in Shenzhen, in southern China, operates a range of online and mobile services, including the hugely popular social mobile apps WeChat and QQ. The company created its AI lab in April, and it is growing rapidly. Tencent sent a delegation of AI researchers, recruiters, and business representatives to the industry's preeminent event, the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, held in Barcelona, Spain, this week. Tencent's push into AI research reflects a broader shift across China's consumer technology industry toward more fundamental research designed to spur real innovation.

The final argument of the pessimists is that automation is "hollowing out" the workforce by replacing the jobs of the middle-skill professions, so we will be left with a world of hedge-fund managers and their maids. There has been some disproportionate losses of middle-income jobs in America and Europe since 1980, but as the MIT economist David Autor argues, it's as much to do with competition from China as automation per se. And he thinks it is running out of steam anyway. Journalists, he says "tend to overstate the extent of machine substitution for human labor and ignore the strong complementarities between automation and labor that increase productivity, raise earnings, and augment demand for labor."

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This story was delivered to BI Intelligence "Fintech Briefing" subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. 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.

In a bid to promote the safe use of drones, the transport ministry will set up a pilot certification system involving private organizations, sources said Friday. The envisioned system will allow the ministry to evaluate the skills of pilots objectively when they seek government permission to fly small unmanned aerial vehicles over densely populated areas and other places where drone flights are restricted, the sources said. The ministry will establish certification criteria by the end of March, which will include the content of the training programs that private organizations provide to drone pilot candidates, as well as criteria for trainers and qualification examinations, the sources said. It will begin accepting applications for certification from private organizations in fiscal 2017, which begins in April. The names of certified organizations will be posted on the ministry's website.

Son (pictured above) said SoftBank will make the investment from a $100 billion technology fund that the company previously said it would raise in part using its own capital and commitments from the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund. First announced in October, the SoftBank Vision Fund will create as many as 50,000 tech jobs in the U.S, according to Son. The fund will also invest in a number of other countries around the world. The investment described by Son represents more than 30 percent of the total amount all venture capital firms had available to invest as of the middle of this year. But can an investment as large as the one Son outlined generate as many jobs as he claimed?

Cerevo Inc. said Friday it has launched a shape-changing home projector robot that can turn ceilings, walls and floors into displays. The Tokyo-based hardware venture firm's new robot, called Tipron, is also capable of learning where to project images, moving to those positions by itself, and returning to its charging station. "Sci-Fi anime and movies sometimes have a scene where all walls at home are becoming digital displays … it would be possible to re-create it in real life if actual displays are embedded" there, but it would cost too much, Cerevo CEO Takuma Iwasa said at a news conference in Tokyo. "We came up with Tipron to solve that issue. If the robot has a projector on its head and can move around independently, it is theoretically possible to project images on every wall," he said. But Tipron, which can project 80-inch (203-cm) images, costs a lofty ¥229,800.

Friday is here, and we learned that Magic Leap's wondrous demo video last year was all CGI magic, that scientists have discovered a dinosaur tail with feathers, and explain why Pebble fans might not be happy with the company's new owners. For the last couple of years, Magic Leap has been promising a groundbreaking augmented reality experience. Despite hiring hundreds of employees and snagging big-name financial backers (like Google) it hasn't actually shown off the technology publicly, leaving all of us to wonder what's going on. The Information reports that the company has had trouble implementing some of its patented fiber-optic technology, and may be preparing a wearable headset that's closer to what we've seen from Microsoft's HoloLens than the WETA-created demo video it posted last year. On Thursday John Glenn died at the age of 95 in Columbus, Ohio.

Koichiro Otaki started taking aerial pictures of photovoltaic power stations in April 2015. At first, it was an innocent desire to capture their sheer scale and aesthetic value that motivated him, he says. Solar parks, mostly in rural, desolate areas, were also among the few places where he could practice flying a drone without having to worry about hitting people or tall structures, he says. Weather permitting, the 38-year-old freelance photographer would toss a compact drone into his backpack and venture out to the suburbs of Tokyo or up north to the Tohoku region by motorcycle, snapping away at solar panels neatly lined up along river banks, mountain slopes and even abandoned golf courses. "I was simply captivated by their geometric beauty," Otaki said of the panels.