After Gov. Jerry Brown announced a proposal this week to ratchet up the state's minimum wage 50% by 2022, business groups warned that the rapid increase could actually hurt the people Brown was trying to help. In addition to laying off workers and moving jobs out of state, they predicted, companies would move more aggressively to automate, replacing at least some of the people on their payroll with machines. That's not an idle threat, especially for low-skilled labor; the number of tasks that computerized devices can perform at least as well as humans grows every year. But automation isn't necessarily bad for workers -- just look at what's happening in the U.S. garment industry. Competition from Bangladesh, Vietnam and other low-wage countries has been devastating to U.S. apparel jobs, as many domestic manufacturers have moved their factories overseas to slash their labor costs.

Microsoft's racist chatbot, Tay, has returned to Twitter, albeit briefly. After being shut down last week for using racial slurs, praising Hitler and calling for genocide, the artificial'intelligence' came back, tweeting a number of nonsensical posts and boasting about smoking cannabis in front of the police before being turned off. Tay's account was made public again on Wednesday morning, but soon appeared to be suffering from a glitch, repeatedly tweeting the message: "You are too fast, please take a rest..." Microsoft's sexist racist Twitter bot @TayandYou is BACK in fine form pic.twitter.com/nbc69x3LEd Tay, who is modelled on a millenial teenage girl, then tweeted: "Kush! A few foul-mouthed tweets later, the account was made private once again, and the tweets are now invisible from the public. In a statement, Microsoft said: "Tay remains offline while we make adjustments.

It may not be good news for anyone who finds insects creepy. Scientists have proved they can control how beetles fly and walk by turning them into cyborgs. Researchers fitted giant flower beetles, which measure two inches long and weigh around 0.3 ounces, with radio transmitter backpacks and wired them to their limbs. This allowed them to electrically stimulate muscles in the insects' legs so they could control their walking speed, gait and direction. Scientists have shown they can control the movement of giant flower beetles by inserting tiny electrodes into their muscles.

Mitsubishi Electric Corp., a supplier of air-to-air missiles to Japan's armed forces, is looking to adapt the technologies it originally developed for military use to help autonomous driving cars detect obstacles and avoid collisions. Components such as millimeter-wave radar, sonar, sensors and cameras -- some of which were developed to guide missiles -- are being adapted for use in self-driving vehicles that will hit the roads by 2020, Katsumi Adachi, senior chief engineer at Mitsubishi's automotive equipment division, said in an interview. It has received orders for automatic braking systems and instruments that help a vehicle keep to its lane, he said. The Japanese supplier is seeking to catch up with Continental AG, Denso Corp. and Hitachi Automotive Systems Ltd. in providing assistance technologies that are becoming increasingly standard offerings in new vehicle models. While its competitors have a head start, Adachi says Mitsubishi will be able to offer superior systems next year that will benefit from its expertise in high-precision sensors and electric-power steering systems.

For the last five years, IBM has strived to reinvent itself as a cloud computing and cognitive platform company to support its large enterprise clients as they shift their operations online, including many in travel and transportation. With most large companies today evolving into digital companies, cloud computing is a booming marketplace for the big four industry providers: IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Google, for example, stated that cloud could overtake advertising revenue in five years. Travel companies like Etihad and Lufthansa are helping drive IBM's cloud sales. The UAE carrier signed a 700 million IT deal with IBM last October, while Germany's national airline invested 1.25 billion in Big Blue in November 2014 to integrate cloud computing. Cognitive, on the other hand, is IBM's wild child savant compared to its older cloud sibling.

This article was first published in the July 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online The future of artificial intelligence begins with a game of Space Invaders. From the start, the enemy aliens are making kills -- three times they destroy the defending laser cannon within seconds. Half an hour in, and the hesitant player starts to feel the game's rhythm, learning when to fire back or hide. Finally, after playing ceaselessly for an entire night, the player is not wasting a single bullet, casually shooting the high-score floating mothership in between demolishing each alien. No one in the world can play a better game at this moment. This player, it should be mentioned, is not human, but an algorithm on a graphics processing unit programmed by a company called DeepMind. Instructed simply to maximise the score and fed only the data stream of 30,000 pixels per frame, the algorithm -- known as a deep Q-network – is then given a new challenge: an unfamiliar Pong-like game called Breakout, in which it needs to hit a ball through a rainbow-coloured brick wall. "After 30 minutes and 100 games, it's pretty terrible, but it's learning that it should move the bat towards the ball," explains DeepMind's cofounder and chief executive, a 38-year-old artificial-intelligence researcher named Demis Hassabis. "Here it is after an hour, quantitatively better but still not brilliant. But two hours in, it's more or less mastered the game, even when the ball's very fast. After four hours, it came up with an optimal strategy -- to dig a tunnel round the side of the wall, and send the ball round the back in a superhuman accurate way. The designers of the system didn't know that strategy."

Over the last several years, artificial intelligence (AI) has shifted from being an esoteric branch of computer science to an everyday technology that most of us carry in a pocket or purse--AI is what drives Apple's Siri, Facebook's photo-tagging, Spotify playlists and Google's auto-complete, just for starters. But can we also expect that someday soon AI will report and write the important news of the day--and technology stories like this one? Well, guess what: It already has. First, a bit of background: Many of the most exciting AI advances are driven by research in cognitive computing and natural language generation (NLG) processing, which allow computers to analyze massive quantities of data and generate a plain English document that highlights the most important insights. Those advances are made stronger through deep learning, a field of AI that uses neural networks to teach computers to sift through massive amounts of data to find their own patterns.

Standard Chartered is moving heavily into radical new technologies that could one day see robots providing bespoke wealth advice and artificial intelligence answering customer questions. The emerging markets-focused British bank has set up a new lab called the eXellerator in Singapore in an attempt to bring theoretical ideas from Silicon Valley to life. Chief executive Bill Winters has put the centre at the heart of a 1.5bn commitment to improving computing and IT systems. Some of the ideas are also urgently needed cost-saving initiatives. The bank has hired thousands of additional compliance officers in the past three years and last year hiked annual compliance spending by an extra 1bn in an effort to stop workers breaking laws and regulations, in the wake of expensive scandals including the breaking of US sanctions against Iran.

We propose here a simple, robust and scalable technique to perform supervised clustering on numerical data. It can also be used for density estimation, and even to define a concept of variance that is scale-invariant. This is part of our general statistical framework for data science. Here we discuss clustering and density estimation on the grid. The grid can be seen as an 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional array.

Students at Lebanese American University (LAU) participate in a hardware design workshop that leverages the tools of the fourth Industrial Revolution. We are in the midst of the greatest industrial revolution in human history. The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4ID) is an economic transformation a thousand-times wider and deeper than anything that has come before it. "The changes are so profound that, from the perspective of human history, there has never been a time of greater promise or potential peril," according to Professor Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF). The 4ID is characterized by the confluence of next generation technologies like: quantum computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, autonomous transportation and robotics, the Internet of Things, additive manufacturing including 3D printing, biotechnology, and more generally; the merging of the digital and physical worlds.