As we continue to chart the evolution of humanoid robots, humanity seems to be bypassing ethics over practicality. Robots already have advanced to a point that is leading to serious concern about the economic impact of humans being outsourced to robots for tasks as diverse as service, manufacturing, nursing, housework, yard maintenance and full-fledged agricultural duties. Some are predicting that robots of all types could fully replace humans by 2045. Meanwhile, humanoid robots filled with the latest artificial intelligence could lead to the outsourcing of future soldiers, leading to the literal possibility of robot wars. All of this is occurring as ethicists, governments and citizens scramble to make sense of exactly what type of future we should be looking forward to, and if any boundaries to this type of progress need to be made universal.

It's a non-traditional application of neural networks where the network is used to'hallucinate' a desirable image,

The following is a condensed and edited interview with Ginni Rometty, CEO, IBM. You joined IBM 35 years ago. What was the company like back then? What struck me was the seriousness of the kind of things we did. We were building complex back-office banking systems.

A sinister threat is brewing deep inside the technology laboratories of Silicon Valley, according to Professor Stephen Hawking. Artificial Intelligence, disguised as helpful digital assistants and self-driving vehicles, is gaining a foothold, and it could one day spell the end for mankind. The world-renowned professor has warned robots could evolve faster than humans and their goals will be unpredictable. Professor Stephen Hawking (pictured) claimed AI would be difficult to stop if the appropriate safeguards are not in place. During a talk in Cannes, Google's chairman Eric Schmidt said AI will be developed for the benefit of humanity and there will be systems in place in case anything goes awry. 'We've all seen those movies,' he said.

Art lovers usually have to rely on headsets or humans to guide them around galleries. But visitors to the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth can now take a tour in the company of a little robot called Aggie. Like many galleries, it is dealing with a lack of money and falling visitor numbers. So, the curators are taking a less conventional route to attract more visitors. "We thought it would be really fun for family audiences to have something which was almost like a child-like guide, but a robot, who could excite them and also create new worlds around them," Chris Taverns, from the Art Gallery of Western Australia, told Al Jazeera.

Many business leaders recognise that developments in robotics and AI are coming and that they will bring significant changes for business and society. These developments are not happening slowly and are all around us. Take my friend for example. When I called him recently, he was in his Tesla, driving up the A3, having a bowl of cereal. This shows how quickly technology is moving.

Jana Eggers will be speaking on "How to Scope an AI Project" at the upcoming O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference. Subscribe to the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data and data science. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. In this episode of the O'Reilly Data Show, I spoke with Jana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logics. Most recently she has been helping companies across many industries adopt AI technologies as a way to enable a range of intelligent data applications.

There is no question that artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are entering the workplace in many graduate level jobs, and this trend is likely to continue and quicken. Times Higher Education recently asked whether universities needed to rethink what they do and how they do it, given that artificial intelligence is beginning to take over many post-university careers. The implications and – most importantly – the potential benefits for education are significant, and perhaps not yet appreciated by higher education leaders. With that in mind, here are four examples of how AI can benefit universities. First, there is a new role for higher education, which is to equip graduates to work effectively alongside artificially intelligent systems.

DESCRIPTION Do you want to join an innovative team of scientists who use machine learning and statistical techniques to create state-of-the-art solutions for providing better value to Amazon's customers? Do you want to build advanced algorithmic systems that help optimize millions of transactions every day? Are you excited by the prospect of analyzing and modeling terabytes of data to solve real world problems? Do you like to own end-to-end business problems/metrics and directly impact the profitability of the company? Do you like to innovate and simplify?

The idea of automated customer service is nothing new – from speech recognition technology on dreaded call center phone lines, to Apple's groundbreaking Siri personal assistant system, AI has been in our lives and in our pockets for a while now. Yet, young as 2016 still is, it's already defined itself as the year of the Chatbot – from Microsoft's experimental and indeed controversial (more on that later) attempt to engage millennials with the creation of'Tay', a chatbot designed to imitate a teenage girl, in March, to April's recent inundation of announcements from companies eager to trial Chatbots, this year could be the year Chatbots go mainstream. But in a world where the search for authenticity seems increasingly futile and more and more of our meaningful interactions take place via a screen, will the public really welcome Bots? Are they even ready for widespread release? And how are businesses going to capitalize on them? Put simply, a Bot is a piece of software which performs automated tasks and simple, time-consuming or repetitive errands, and this is exactly what a ChatBot does – except (you guessed it), it simulates human interaction.