Will a robot steal your job or help make you a better one? The evidence points to the increased role of automation in the workplace: as many as 70 per cent of executives plan to significantly increase their investments in AI-related technologies, according to consultant Accenture. What's the best way to take advantage of robotics, automation, and AI? And how can CIOs help the business to evaluate these opportunities and create a boost in productivity and performance? How can executives best understand the role of the robots?

Some of the most promising work is already taking place in healthcare, where cognitive computing is identifying insights that can be used by doctors in their fight against deadly and chronic diseases. Cancer centers in New York, North Carolina, India and Thailand are using these systems to help their doctors in their efforts to provide personalized, evidence-based cancer care tailored to each patient's unique needs. Hospitals in Colorado are helping patients with heart disease adopt--and stick with--heart–healthy behaviors, aiming to help prevent future costly hospital stays. And a new study in California is using technology to determine whether it is possible to predict veterans at risk for long-term PTSD and then customize treatment recommendations to help address the devastating condition.

Despite the various, and staggering, leaps made by computer scientists, critics argue that machines will never truly match humans until they gain consciousness. Considered a uniquely human trait, consciousness includes being sentient and self-aware, as well as aware of your surroundings. However, many scientists argue animals are as conscious as humans, and the theory of Phi could one day be used to determine if droids are capable of showing such behaviour. Matthew Davidson, PhD Candidate in the neuroscience of consciousness at Monash University has explained what the Phi theory is, and why it is significant, in an article for The Conversation. How and why circumstances may give rise to consciousness remain some of the most puzzling questions in science. Do you think that the machine you are reading this story on, right now, has a feeling of'what it is like' to be in its state?

In Japan, humanoid robots are seen as an important part of the solution to the looming double problem of a shortage of labor and an aging society. The first challenge is for robots to be seen as a normal part of society by helping out with everyday tasks, which is why Aldebaran Robotics' diminutive NAO robot recently undertook a two week internship at the main Mitsubishi UFJ bank in central Tokyo. Gizmag called in to see how NAO was doing. NAO was created in 2006 and most recently came to our attention when helping kids learn to write in Switzerland. During the two week internship in Tokyo, NAO helped customers with questions or queries they had, in Chinese and English as well as Japanese.

The past couple of decades have seen technology forge ahead relentlessly, enabling us to communicate in unprecedented ways, work more smartly and from any location, carry our phones in our pocket and much more. And artificial intelligence has evolved somewhat too, alongside all of the'usual' tech that we use daily, bringing with it a more urgent perceived need to consider the threat that it might pose. Bill Gates has come out to state that he's firmly in the'AI is a threat camp', so too has Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest thinkers of our time. But not everyone is in agreement with them. At the Dublin Web Summit, I attended a talk – the name now escapes me unfortunately when it comes to who it was by – and when the speaker, a high profile tech name (that much I do know) was asked about the threat posed by AI, he said something that I found interesting.

Unexpected convergent consequences…this is what happens when eight different exponential technologies all explode onto the scene at once. This post (sixth in a series of seven) is a look at robotics. Be sure to read the first five posts if you haven't already: When the World Is Wired: The Magic of the Internet of Everything Where Artificial Intelligence Is Now and What's Just Around the Corner The Near Future of VR and AR: What You Need to Know Drones Have Reached at Tipping Point--Here's What Happens Next How 3D Printing Is Transforming the Way We Make Things An expert might be reasonably good at predicting the growth of a single exponential technology (e.g., 3D Printing), but try to predict the future when AI, robotics, VR, drones, and computation are all doubling, morphing and recombining…You have a very exciting (read: unpredictable) future. This post is the result of an interview with Rodney Brooks on the top five recent robotics breakthroughs (2012-2015) and the top five anticipated robotics breakthroughs (2016-2018). Rodney is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT.

Look at it just sitting there on a wall. South Korea's robots are future-proof. A rescue drone by the Korean Advanced Institute Of Science and Technology is a flying wall-climbing fireproof building inspection machine. Named CAROS, for Climbing Aerial RObot System, looks like a normal quadcopter. It flies to and fro like a quadcopter, then turns perpendicular to the ground and attaches itself to surfaces it needs to inspect.

An anti-tank missile fires by an Iraqi CH-4 drone destroys an ISIS artillery piece, seen in footage captured by the drone's onboard, retractable sensor turret. China's armed CH-3 and CH-4 drones have recently made international news, being used by nations that range from Iraq to Nigeria. And now NORINCO, one of China's leading defense contractors, is getting in on the international drone export game, showing off a new armed drone helicopter. The Sky Saker H300, seen here in Dubai, is China's first helicopter UCAV. Being cheaper and easier to use then larger UCAVs like the Reaper and CH-4, it could become a battalion and company level UCAV for on demand air strikes.

In the winter of 2012, I travelled from New Delhi, where I grew up, to Calcutta to visit my cousin Moni. My father accompanied me as a guide and companion, but he was a sullen and brooding presence, lost in a private anguish. He is the youngest of five brothers, and Moni is his firstborn nephew--the eldest brother's son. Since 2004, Moni, now fifty-two, has been confined to an institution for the mentally ill (a "lunatic home," as my father calls it), with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He is kept awash in antipsychotics and sedatives, and an attendant watches, bathes, and feeds him through the day. My father has never accepted Moni's diagnosis. Over the years, he has waged a lonely campaign against the psychiatrists charged with his nephew's care, hoping to convince them that their diagnosis was a colossal error, or that Moni's broken psyche would somehow mend itself. He has visited the institution in Calcutta twice--once without warning, hoping to see a transformed Moni, living a secretly normal life behind the barred gates. But there was more than just avuncular love at stake for him in these visits. Moni is not the only member of the family with mental illness. Two of my father's four brothers suffered from various unravellings of the mind. Madness has been among the Mukherjees for generations, and at least part of my father's reluctance to accept Moni's diagnosis lies in a grim suspicion that something of the illness may be buried, like toxic waste, in himself. Rajesh, my father's third-born brother, had once been the most promising of the Mukherjee boys--the nimblest, the most charismatic, the most admired. But in the summer of 1946, at the age of twenty-two, he began to behave oddly, as if a wire had been tripped in his brain. The most obvious change in his personality was a volatility: good news triggered uncontained outbursts of joy; bad news plunged him into inconsolable desolation. By that winter, the sine curve of Rajesh's psyche had tightened in its frequency and gained in its amplitude.

"Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business" (Random House) is Charles Duhigg's follow-up to his best-selling "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business," which was published in 2012. The new book, like its predecessor, has a format that's familiar in contemporary nonfiction: exemplary tales interpolated with a little social and cognitive science. The purpose of the tales is to create entertaining human-interest narratives; the purpose of the science is to help the author pick out a replicable feature of those narratives for readers to emulate. What enabled the pilot to land the badly damaged plane? How did the academic dropout with anxiety disorder become a champion poker player? What made "West Side Story" and Disney's "Frozen" into mega-hits?