Almost 30 years ago I stood on the steps of a converted Armenian dance hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, about to start my first day at an MIT startup called Gold Hill Computers. They were the first company to develop software that enabled companies to build expert systems applications on a PC platform. The focus in the 1980s for AI was on industries such as aerospace and defense, computer-aided design and engineering, software engineering, financial services, manufacturing, medicine and science. Never at that point in time did I consider that algorithms could be applied to my own profession in communications. And yet that is just what has happened.

This time last year Steve Wozniak was sounding a cautionary note about the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI), warning that computers would one day take over from humans and joking that we might even end up as their pets. In a recent interview with Australia's ABC TV's Lateline the engineering genius appeared more sanguine about the future of self-aware, super-intelligent Artificial Intelligence and much more concerned with the real world killer robots that are all but with us: Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS). The Apple co-founder maintains that human-level Artificial Intelligence won't happen for "a very long time": It might take 200 years before they are really fully able to operate all of their needs in the world, until then they're going to need human beings … I'm not really worried at all. It's very scary to make autonomous weapons that are just following some programmed set of instructions … even when you're driving a car there is no one set of rules … if a lane is closed off you have to do something against the rules … I don't think it's a good idea at all. I don't think we can really stop it.

Business documents written in foreign languages are no longer the problem they once were thanks to technologies like Google Translate, but what about contracts written in legalese? That's where LawGeex hopes to help with an AI-based online tool. LawGeex offers what it calls the world's first contract review platform based on artificial intelligence. The goal, it says, is to help businesses and individuals "get a fair deal" before signing an agreement. Toward that end, it combines machine-learning algorithms with crowdsourced data, text analytics, and the knowledge of expert lawyers to make in-depth contract reviews accessible to everyone.

Humans have always had a complicated relationship with new "technologies." From awe to fear, centuries ago, Plato even worried that writing would adversely affect people's memories. Modernity has had a particular curiosity regarding artificial intelligence (AI). From Terminator-style killer robots to emotive humanoids, the mention of AI brings to mind the many silver screen renderings of some future civilization. More likely than any of these, however, is the reality that AI will probably turn out to be another commonplace technology that, while novel at first, will end up integrated into our everyday lives.

IBM is reportedly going to combine Blockchain's distributed ledger technology with its artificial intelligence system Watson to make the billions of smart devices in an emerging world of Internet of Things work safer and smarter. According to a lengthy article in CoinDesk written by Michael del Castillo IBM is still in prototype phase in developing this project that brings together the company's Internet of Things Foundation and Watson divisions to create the Watson Internet of Things group. The project is being overseen by IBM's chief architect in charge of Internet of Things security Tim Hahn who told CoinDesk that the possibilities of the collaboration of artificial intelligence, IoT and Blockchain were huge. "What we're doing with blockchain and devices is enabling the information those devices supply to effect the blockchain. You begin to approach the kind of things we see in movies."

The most important question for Game of Thrones fans belongs to quantum mechanics: Schrödinger's Jon Snow. Or in other words, is...

Which industries will come to the fore in the next decade, and beyond, and become hubs of innovation? According to former State Department official Alec Ross, they won't be the industries that have dominated technology thus far. Instead, artificial intelligence (AI), genomics and robotics will lead the way. On Tuesday, the Italian Embassy in Washington, D.C., held an event to discuss Ross' recently published book, The Industries of the Future. He expounded on the book's themes and highlighted what it will take for individuals, companies and countries to harness the changes that he sees coming to the global economy.

Humankind shuddered once again as machines seemed to score yet another triumph in what had been an exclusively human arena. In case you missed it, last month an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated novel almost won a Japanese literary competition, inspiring awe, intrigue, and eventually skepticism. The new novel's plot "is essentially told from the subjective of an AI that becomes aware of its budding talents as a writer, and abandons its primary task of serving humanity," according to the "Motherboard" channel at Vice.com, and the Los Angeles Times, citing a report in The Japan News, even provided a translation of the novel's final thrilling sentence. "I writhed with joy, which I experienced for the first time, and kept writing with excitement. The day a computer wrote a novel. The computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans."

From package delivery drones to bomb-sniffing dogs, a bill approved by the Senate on Tuesday makes extensive changes to aviation safety, security and consumer programs and policies. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The Power9 processor that IBM is working on in conjunction with hyperscale and HPC customers could be the most important chip that Big Blue has brought to market since the Power4 processor back in 2001. That was another world, back then, with the dot-com boom having gone bust and enterprises looking for a less expensive but beefy NUMA server on which to run big databases and transaction processing systems. The world that the Power9 processor will enter in 2017 is radically changed. A two-socket system has more compute, memory, and I/O capacity and bandwidth than those behemoths from a decade and a half ago delivered, and while NUMA systems are still important, distributed architectures now rule the datacenter for most workloads, and fat nodes comprised of a mix of processors and accelerators, rather than big CPU-only NUMA clusters, are becoming more common as companies try to create flexible and yet powerful compute complexes to address a wide variety of workloads. As the variety and complexity of Intel's own processor roadmap attests, the age of general purpose computing, where a few CPU SKUs covered the bases, is pretty much over.