From Uber's perspective, their company only exists on the back of a large volunteer workforce that use their ride-hailing company app and platform to carry out piece work. The Uber company growth and performance relies on this workforce to deliver the service. Uber wants to treat this non-unionized group as a contractor arrangement which gives them the maximum flexibility and minimum employee commitments. The challenge is that a virtual business needs physical workers, at least until self-driving cars come along, and that's another whole story. But as lessons of Uber pulling out of China and with the continued competition against Lyft in the US, their business model is predicated on an available workforce to operate locally.

There is universal proverb that roughly translates into "Empty vessels make the most noise." Some ascribe it to Plato, but having come from Punjab (India), I can safely confirm that the Punjabi translation means exactly that, and Punjab has as much to do with Plato as chicken tikka masala has to do with French cuisine. One of my favourite version of this proverb comes from Polish, which translated into English means, "The cow which moos a lot gives little milk." This pretty much reflects a certain philosopher from Oxford who without having any foundation in principles of engineering, let alone (proper) machine learning, seems to think himself as the leading authority to warn the world against the perils of machine learning. And for the last few years has busied himself making outrageous, pseudoscientific and shamanic claims to sell his book.

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.…

The Abe administration is stepping up efforts to improve the safety of drones as it tries to develop a delivery service using the unmanned vehicles in depopulated areas, such as remote islands, by 2018, a government source said. The cost of developing the new private-sector service is expected to be incorporated in the budget request for the fiscal year starting next April, the source said Monday. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has pledged to draw up necessary measures for the drone delivery program within the next three years. The administration sees drone-related services as a pillar to support elderly people and to deliver relief goods in disaster areas. The government is also aiming to help private-sector companies so they can start a drone home delivery service in urban areas by 2020, when Tokyo will host the Olympics, the source said.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, dressed as Super Mario, holds a red ball during the closing ceremony of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Japanese PM Shinzo Abe's show-stopping appearance at today's closing ceremony in Rio, dressed as iconic game character Super Mario, already sets the tone for what lies in store. Japan is known internationally for its technological innovations, so Tokyo 2020 organizers are aiming to launch ambitious tech projects that will boost the economy and wow crowds. Tourists staying next to the Olympic Village in Tokyo's Odaiba neighborhood can choose, for example, to hang out with robot helpers of all sizes and sorts that offer up tips on the best transport, food and entertainment options in Tokyo. And that won't be the only place they'll encounter their robotic counterparts.

The rover that Nasa has been using to explore Mars in search of life has captured an incredible panorama of the planet that shows it looking a lot like Earth. The Curiosity Mars rover captured the vista on August 5, four years after the rover landed on Gale Crater. The view shows eroded mesas and buttes with a flat desert-like foreground, which looks eerily similar the southwestern US. Look familiar?: The buttes and mesas captured by Nasa's Curiosity rover on Mars look of similar shape and condition to parts of Earth, especially the southwestern US The surface seen in the footage is part of a geological layer called the Murray formation, which formed from lakebed mud deposits. Nasa said the dark mesa just left of Curiosity's robotic arm is about 50 feet high and 300 feet from the rover's position, theHuffington Post reported.

Scalebound Is Letting You Do Awesome Things With Dragons, Here's What We Know North Korea Plans To Survive The Zombie Apocalypse, Training Students To Survive The End Of ...

Yoshinori Nomura felt like weeping. It was the morning of June 24, Brexit day, and markets were moving against him. It was the hedge fund manager's self-learning computer program that had placed the bet, selling Japanese stock-index futures before a sizable market advance. Nomura had anticipated a rally, but decided not to interfere, and his fund was paying the price. Then, in an instant, everything changed.

Scalebound Is Letting You Do Awesome Things With Dragons, Here's What We Know

The cities of the future will be huge and super-dense -- but will they also be alive? Could the increasingly complex systems needed to manage the next generation of megacities become our first true artificial intelligence? People have speculated before about the idea that the Internet might become self-aware and turn into the first "real" A.I., but could it be more likely to happen to cities, in which humans actually live and work and navigate, generating an even more chaotic system? As cities become more networked and their mixture of urban infrastructure and surveillance infrastructure becomes more complex, eventually we'll have to build cities that can think for themselves. People have speculated about the potential for computer systems to help in urban planning forever, including papers about the use of "fuzzy logic" to automate the decision-making process and A.I. solutions for land use planning, and the an A.I. "spatial decision support system."