You might be impatient for a self-driving car that can roll you from the bar to your house when you're too buzzed to drive, but autonomous vehicles have bigger problems to worry about. Since 2000, the fire season has grown longer, and the damage more severe. The US spent more than $2 billion fighting the flames last year--and it lost six firefighters doing it. The solution, according to Lockheed Martin, is taking the human out of the battle. In a series of demonstration flights last week, the defense contractor showed off four unmanned aircraft that join forces to beat back the flames.

For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I write frequently about Fourth Industrial Revolution (#4IR) themes such as Tech Innovation, Agtech, and Industrial Disruption. If I had to pick one area I find most exciting, most potentially disruptive and thus the best opportunity for return on investment, it would be A.I. Artificial Intelligence is the brain that makes everything work. It's easy to get lost in #4IR Tech Innovation jargon with complex topics such as: Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), Augmented Intelligence, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Neural Networks Internet of Things (IOT), Internet of Industrial Things (IOIT), IOE (Internet of Everything) Blockchain, Fintech, Mobile Payments, Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin Big Data, Data Science, Data Mining: Especially for Healthcare and Agriculture Cybersecurity, Cyber Terrorism, Hacking, Asymmetrical Warfare Smart Cities, Smart Grid, Energy Storage, Portable Power 3D and 4D Printing: BioPrinting, Cloud Manufacturing, Bionics, and printing objects that assemble and reshape themselves over time Industrial Revolution says that, ultimately, the innovation leads to disruption, change, and economic unrest… but also leads to a new era of opportunity and invention. Or is it the other way around? The anatomy of infrastructure is not unlike that of the human body, and we all know it's possible to live long, healthy lives.

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When Pyotr Stolyarsky died in 1944, he was considered Russia' s greatest violin teacher. He counted among his pupils a coterie of stars, including David Oistrakh and Nathan Milstein, and a school for gifted musicians in his native Odessa was named after him in 1933. But Stolyarsky couldn't play the violin anywhere near as well as his best students. What he could do was whisper metaphors into their ears. He might lean over and explain how his mother cooked Sabbath dinner.

We imagine them to be wickedly intelligent, like Samantha from the movie Her. There is no "I" in their AI. They are so hopeless that some people argue that bots would be better without conversation. But without conversation they are not bots. They are more like the Internet on Nokia feature phones (a.k.a.

Standouts included Hike, the Indian messaging app that works offline (useful in a country where connectivity is patchy and data is bought in packages) and transcends the dozens of languages and avoids complex keyboards by using digital stickers as tools of communication. Mustafa Suleyman co-founded DeepMind, now owned by Google, and is forging ahead with the application of AI to solve some of the worlds biggest problems. The use of AI diagnosis in medical imaging can speed up treatment times for cancer and improve patient prognosis. DeepMind are attempting to solve the problem of most NHS data currently being written on paper, and therefore largely inaccessible. Mustafa says "In life, data is pushed to us.

Google has built machine learning systems that can create their own cryptographic algorithms -- the latest success for AI's use in cybersecurity. But what are the implications of our digital security increasingly being handed over to intelligent machines? Google Brain, the company's California-based AI unit, managed the recent feat by pitting neural networks against each other. Two systems, called Bob and Alice, were tasked with keeping their messages secret from a third, called Eve. None were told how to encrypt messages, but Bob and Alice were given a shared security key that Eve didn't have access too.

In Boston, two major academic centers are teaming up to apply big data and machine learning to the problem of diagnosing cancers earlier and with more accuracy. It is research that might have major implications for the anatomic pathology profession. A collaborative effort between teams at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) has resulted in an innovation that could result in more accurate diagnoses in the pathology laboratory. The teams have been working on a machine learning software program that will eventually function as an artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the accuracy of diagnostics. They hope to someday build AI-powered computer systems that can accurately and quickly interpret pathology images.

The app boom is over. There are now more than 4.2 million apps available for Android and iOS, but three-quarters of American smartphone users download a grand total of zero new apps per month. They might be mostly free and easy to access, but apps are struggling to make it on to our phones and tablets. According to comScore, we spend the majority of our screen time using just three apps, with the average American spending almost half their time in just one. With the eyeballs of the world glued to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Skype, developers have started turning once-simple chat apps into complex ecosystems. And at the centre of this change is a horde of subservient bots. You've just walked into your kitchen after a long week. "Play Etta James," you say.

During his first official visit to Australia, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed how the company will be working with a range of local organisations to push the next stage of Australia's investment into artificial intelligence [AI]. Among the world's first users of Microsoft's new high performance virtual and intelligent machines are the Australian Government, Cricket Australia, and Webjet. Microsoft will deliver cloud services to Australian developers that will underpin the next generation of intelligent apps. This comes as the largest Windows 10 deployment in the Asia-Pacific region, and will help companies around Australia generate deeper customer insights and learnings. Speaking at a technology developer's conference in Sydney on Wednesday, Nadella said the new intelligent technology to be deployed by Microsoft and will allow human-like interactions with complex business systems.