Silicon Valley, or the Greater Bay Area, is the 18th largest economy in the world, more than half the size of Canada's economy and bigger than Switzerland, Saudi Arabia or Turkey. This is because the region has become the world leader in research and development of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, software and virtual reality. "Software is eating the world," said Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen famously in 2011. It was controversial but prescient. Five years later, software-driven machines and drones perform surgery, write news stories, compose music, translate, analyze, wage war, guard, listen, speak and entertain.

Cancer, the single most feared diagnosis imaginable, is being tackled by some of the biggest companies in the world using the most formidable weapon: à la artificial intelligence. In fact, the milestones we have hit in past two years in diagnosing rare forms of cancer using clinical data, has stumped the scientific community. At the University of Tokyo's Institute of Medical Science, IBM's Watson matched a patients' symptoms against 20 million clinical oncology studied. In the western world, Google and Amazon are helping scientists analyze genetic data. Both, Google Genomics and Amazon Web Services, are offering analytical functions of the cloud to help scientists make sense of genomics data.

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SMART-CARD public-transport ticketing systems let people hop between buses, subways, trams, surface rail and river boats--even when these are operated by different companies--without having to buy new tickets. This undoubted good, though, has ramifications. One is that anyone with access can, by following individual passengers (or, at least, their cards), study precisely where people are going. Companies use this knowledge to optimise services--again, an undoubted good. But many other things, some disturbing to freedom lovers, might also be done with smart-card data.

Manulife Financial is working with indico data solutions on artificial intelligence (AI) that will review data from sources such as news articles and analysts' reports and present recommendations to help investment researchers and portfolio managers make more informed decisions. On August 26, the insurer announced that its Lab of Forward Thinking (LOFT) is working with the Boston-based indico on an artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning tool that will be able to analyze unstructured financial data. Manulife and its John Hancock brand in the United States have established LOFT offices in Boston, Toronto, and Singapore that are working to make the most of new technologies such as AI, blockchain, and virtual reality. In this case, the insurer is using indico's platform to decipher natural language and train the computer to analyze text and extract insights that can be tailored to a researcher's individual requirements. "Deep learning, while proven in the realms of the Facebook's and Google's of the world, is just starting to come into its own as an enterprise capability," said indico's CEO and co-founder Slater Victoroff.

A Chinese robot reporter produced 450 Olympic news items over the 15-day sporting event, mostly about China's dominant sports, like badminton and table tennis. While its prose was criticized for being somewhat rote, the coverage certainly was speedy, appearing minutes after events ended. The "AI writing robot" Xiaomingbot (link in Chinese) produced 30 to 40 pieces most days of the Olympics, and on August 14 it published 58 (link in Chinese), according to co-inventor Toutiao news. Toutiao, or "headline news" is a search engine and news syndication service with a website, app, and public WeChat account that boasted 530 million total users in August. Most of the robot news items were 100 words or so. The most-read was a piece on a Badminton Women's Singles game won by London Olympics sliver medalist Wang Yihan.

THE East Japan Railway Company, also known as JR East, is considering the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to make their already-impeccable customer service even better. The AI technology would be used to help call center operators respond to inquiries more efficiently, with a system that turns audio from phone conversations into text, analyzes them and then throws up answers for the operators to use. According to the Nikkei Asian Review, a pilot study is planned for the fall to test the system, which in time will learn which responses are suitable for operators. The AI system will also learn specific railway terminologies, acronyms and new words as it creates a database of words in order to generate better responses to customer queries. There will also be JR East "envisions robots" answering commuter's questions at stations – this potentially refers to the company's AI information robots, which have been in place since 2007.

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In the background, wearing a white t-shirt, is a camera man. Russia's Tigr is a decade-old armored car. Seating 10 soldiers inside with gear, the Tigr's primary missions is to get Russian forces safely to where they need to be, across rough terrain. Since it was made to be filled with people, the newest design takes the Tigr in an odd direction. Instead of a human-driven troop carrier, the latest Tigr model is a remotely controlled gun-firing robot.

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