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.

Getting a robot to balance and walk on two feet is a massive challenge, as the DARPA Challenge revealed. But it turns out it's a little less tricky when you focus on just the legs, as the Alphabet-owned SCHAFT's newest bipedal creation demonstrated by confidently walking out on stage at the New Economic Summit going on in Tokyo. Until it's revealed outside of the conference, we'll have to settle with shaky smartphone footage of the demo reel SCHAFT played during its presentation. But the video shows the lab's development of its latest bipedal robot, including the impressive progress it's made when it comes to dealing with uneven terrain, and random obstacles that would easily trip up other walking bots. Details on what the new SCHAFT robot is capable of are slim at the moment, but apparently it's designed to be low-cost and low-power.

Useless robot waiters are being blamed for the closure of several restaurants in China, after an investment by the owners in automated serving staff turned out to be a financial disaster. According to a translated report in the Worker's Daily -- which might have good reason to undermine robot labour, so perhaps be a bit cynical about it -- a restaurant chain has closed two branches staffed in part by 7,000 ( 4,900) robot servants, with a third surviving the cut; but replacing the underperforming automatons with rubbish old last-generation human service staff. Despite what we may have been told by the pro-robot agenda being pushed by the media, staff weren't impressed, telling the paper: "The robots weren't able to carry soup or other food steady and they would frequently break down. The boss has decided never to use them again." Which is odd, as they seem to be able to weld cars together and put windscreens into them by themselves, surely harder tasks than giving a man a cup of tea?

This week, in Geneva, Indian diplomats are closely monitoring an international expert review of the legal implications of the so-called "lethal autonomous weapons". These weapons will have the capability of selecting and engaging targets on their own. Although fully autonomous weapons are yet to register significant presence in the arsenal of any nation, many consider their development and deployment inevitable in the coming years. Rapid advances in robotics, machine-learning and big-data analytics are at once driving the so-called "fourth industrial revolution" and the transformation of modern warfare. How the leading powers mobilise and deploy these technologies will shape the balance of economic and military power among them in the coming decades.

Emerald Medical Applications Corp. (OTCQB: MRLA), an Israeli-based company engaged in the development and sale of its proprietary DermaCompare cloud-based, artificial intelligence technology for the early diagnosis of Melanoma/skin cancer, today announced entry into a cooperation agreement with Terem, one of Israel's largest community-based, emergency healthcare providers with 17 medical facilities, serving over 700,000 patients throughout Israel. Starting in April 2016, Emerald will begin to offer its DermaCompare technology at each of Terem's clinics throughout Israel, offering advanced dermatological examinations, diagnosisand treatment led by a leading professional Dermatologists. DermaCompare is Emerald's cloud-based, artificial, intelligence technology using Total Body Photography imaging which is capable of being automatically compared to a patient's previous images to diagnose and detect the presence of Melanoma in its earliest stages. Lior Wayn, Emerald's CEO, stated that "DermaCompare, Emerald's FDA approved, HIPPA compliant software technology, which can be downloaded from any Mac or Android based App store, enables physicians andtheir patients, using virtually any digital camera, including cell phones, iPads, tablets and other similar devices, to take Total Body Photography images and, in real-time, transmit these images for dermatological evaluation and identification of suspicious moles, lesions and other skin conditions. These images are then compared using Emerald's cloud database, as well as the patients previous Total Body Photography images, which will dramatically enhance a physician's ability to detect Melanoma earlier, more accurately and more efficient than other means of diagnosis."

The week before David Marcus will take the stage at Facebook's annual F8 developers' conference to announce new tools to help businesses interact with you and me on Messenger, he tries to explain his ambitious idea for the future. Sure, he'll tell the throngs of developers gathering today at San Francisco's scenic former US Army post, Fort Mason, about bots. He'll announce a new bot platform, new ways to find apps, and an artificial intelligence-powered bot engine. At the end of the day, there'll even be free Messenger messenger bags! But all these announcements are just data points that herald something much grander, according to Marcus, who is vice president of messaging at Facebook.

More than 2 million viewers tuned into a Go match series broadcast live from South Korea on YouTube in March. For the first time, global attention was focused on the ancient Chinese board game as Lee Se-dol, one of the world's top players, took on an artificial intelligence program named AlphaGo -- created by Deep Mind, Google's appropriately named AI research team. AlphaGo won 4-1, despite excited cheering from Lee's fans. Interest in AI has spiked in South Korea in recent months. The administration of President Park Geun-hye has announced that it will invest 1 trillion South Korean won ( 866 million) over the next five years to develop AI technologies through joint private-public projects.

A master player of the game Go has won his first match against a Google computer program, after losing three in a row in a best-of-five competition. Lee Se-dol, one of the world's top players, said his win against AlphaGo was "invaluable". The Chinese board game is considered to be a much more complex challenge for a computer than chess, and AlphaGo's wins were seen as a landmark moment for artificial intelligence. Go is a game of two players who take turns putting black or white stones on a 19-by-19 grid. Players win by taking control of the most territory on the board.

According to Chinese newspaper Workers' Daily, two restaurants in Guangzhou, China, that gained some amount of notoriety for their use of robotic waiters have now been forced to close down. One employee said, "the robots weren't able to carry soup or other food steady and they would frequently break down. The boss has decided never to use them again." Yeah, we can't say we're surprised. As far as I can tell, all of these waiter robots can do essentially one thing: travel along a set path while holding food.

SAN FRANCISCO -- You already chat with friends on Facebook Messenger. Now Messenger wants you to chat with businesses and get updates from them, too. That's the future Facebook pitched Tuesday at f8, its annual conference for software developers in San Francisco. "We think you should message a business just the way you would message a friend," Mark Zuckerberg said on stage at f8. He laughed: "To order flowers on 1-800-Flowers,you never have to call 1-800-Flowers again."