For many people in Zambia with health queries, sending a text message is the best way to get it answered. U-report, a free SMS-based service set up by UNICEF and run by volunteers, receives many thousands of questions a month, many specifically about HIV and AIDS. Also popular in Uganda, U-report has seen usage triple in the last three years, and about a thousand new users register every day. The volume of messages is growing so fast that the volunteers can't keep up, so UNICEF is testing software that reads and responds to many of the messages automatically. In Zambia, there are roughly 27,000 new HIV infections a year, according to UNICEF, and 40 per cent of these are in those aged 15 to 24.

Facebook's big announcement at its annual F8 Developer conference, was to make Messenger, its 900-million-user messaging app into a full-fledged platform that allows businesses to communicate with users via chatbots. On the surface, that sounds like a standard, if very ambitious, product announcement, taking an already successful product to the next level. But it's a lot more than that, and it's worth looking into the three intersecting trends rolled into this one announcement to understand why it's a big deal, and why the the chatter around chatbots is everywhere. What we quaintly call "phones" aren't used much for phone calls these days. In fact, measured by actual usage, they're messaging devices; for most users, messaging (texting and all of its more advanced variants) is the core function of the phone, the place they're focused on most of the time.

Computers may trounce humans at games like chess and Go, but there's one game we've still got a lock on: quantum physics. Scientists who had people play an online video game that mimicked a troublesome quantum mechanical problem found that the gamers were far better than the computers at working out viable solutions. The findings, published in the journal Nature, offer a surprisingly effective method of dealing with still-puzzling problems in quantum mechanics – and show that artificial intelligence may still have a lot to learn from the power of human intuition. Scientists have been working to develop quantum computers, which takes advantage of the bizarre ways in which matter behaves at the tiniest of scales. Quantum computers have the potential to vastly outstrip the abilities of conventional devices, allowing them to perform a wide range of complex tasks, from cracking encrypted codes to operating self-driving cars.

A laser engine could someday allow tiny robots to pull 150 times their own weight. At least, that's the implication of new research that has shown how lasers can give tiny drops of water superpowers. The laser technology could someday be used by scientists to deliver drugs to specific areas of the body, scientists claim. Scientists coated millimetre-sized drops of water in a nanometre-scale powder of polypyrrole, a water-repelling plastic which heats up when illuminated. New Scientist reports that the powder coating turned the drop into a liquid marble, with the fluid contained inside.

In addition to accessing cutting edge data analytics tools, and allowing them to scale at speed, companies are looking to platform-as-a-service providers Google, Microsoft and Amazon to remove trade barriers in complex markets like China. Last week, Xero announced a strategic push into Asia with the opening of its new regional headquarters in Singapore. But it will bide its time on China until big platform-as-a-service providers pave the way. "As it works at the moment, we would have to give Chinese authorities access to our source code and host our data in China. I don't know that we'd feel very comfortable with that," Mr Drury told The Australian Financial Review at Xerocon last year when asked about the impact of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a major trade deal involving Australia and 11 other countries.

Here is how I think about these issues. The Artificial in AI can sometimes mislead so let's start by getting rid of the A and asking instead whether more NI, Natural Intelligence, will decimate the middle class. As I said in my TED talk, the brainpower of China and India in the 20th century was essentially "offline". Instead of contributing to the world technological frontier the people of China and India were just barely feeding themselves. China and India are now coming online and I see the increase in natural intelligence as one of the most hopeful facts for the future.

Real-world artificial-intelligence applications are popping up in unexpected places--and much sooner than you might think. While winning a game of Go might be impressive, machine intelligence is also evolving to the point where it can be used by more people to do more things. That's how four engineers with almost zero knowledge of Japanese were able to create software, in just a few months, that can decipher handwriting in the language. The programmers at Reactive Inc. came up with an application that recognizes scrawled-out Japanese with 98.66 percent accuracy. The 18-month-old startup in Tokyo is part of a growing global community of coders and investors who are harnessing the power of neural networks to put AI to far more practical purposes than answering trivia or winning board games.

Facebook launched a concierge service called M through its Messenger app in 2015. M can purchase items, get gifts delivered, book restaurants, and make travel arrangements for the user. There is an element of the Mechanical Turk about it at the moment as it is powered by a combination of AI and real-life people. Siri has been around for a few years but has been upgraded in that time. It's now capable of showing the user specific photos he or she has taken, ordering things via ecommerce apps and giving directions.

In 2008, Max Yankelevich was in India, visiting the cubicle farms where big banks and insurance companies outsource business processes -- the invoices, memos, and other papers pushed to keep organizations humming. The employees were smart, says Yankelevich, who was running a cloud computing startup at the time. There was good money in doing this sort of back office work -- but it was mind numbing. Companies were trying to figure out the back office work with "the brute force of human power," says Yankelevich, who studied artificial intelligence while getting his MIT computer science degree in the 1990s. "I started thinking ... there's gotta be a way where artificial intelligence can be used generically enough to learn some of these things that these people are doing," he says.

With rotors and radios, we are witnessing the birth of a new sport. Aerial acrobatics, sharp turns and staggering climbs that NASCAR can only imagine, all done on the cheap with toys and remote controls, from woods to warehouses to special courses in Dubai. Welcome to the new age of drone racing, as it moves from backyards to broadcasts. Today, ESPN announced it will livestream the U.S. National Drone Racing Championships, a 3-day drone racing event held on New York City's Governor's Island in early August. And then, in October, ESPN will cover the 2016 World Drone Racing Championships at Kualoa Ranch, Hawaii. The drones are flown by pilots wearing goggles and watching through first person vision cameras.