About 20,000 packages an hour are sorted by machine at JD.com's largest robot-run warehouse in Shanghai, China. The company has three million orders a year ranging from smartphones and televisions to nappies. BBC Click's Dan Simmons finds out how the company can deliver items within a few hours and sometimes within minutes.

Bots have officially taken over, and they're about to make our lives a whole lot easier. In April, Facebook introduced bots for Messenger, but the world's most popular social media platform is not the only company to open a "bot store" with consumer functions, and virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa are steadily increasing in both popularity and functionality. With Kik, you can chat with Michelangelo and see the climate conditions through Yahoo! With Operator, shopping is as easy as sending a text, and Pana, the online travel agency, turns a simple chat conversation via text into real bookings. In fact, everyone from 1–800-Flowers and the NBA to Taco Bell is jumping on the chatbot bandwagon.

While running a digital marketing agency, Neerav Parekh regularly updated his clients on their campaign performance with reports and charts that were carefully put together. However, the clients were quickly snowed under the blizzard of data, and inevitably demanded that account managers personally visit them and take them through these reports. This was a laborious process and, rather than plod through it repeatedly, Parekh, a serial entrepreneur, turned to artificial intelligence (AI), the science of trying to make computers think and act like humans, for a solution. His product, Phrazor, is aimed at automating the process of interpreting data and communicating insights. Having used Phrazor for his agency, Parekh has now sought to extend the reach of his product.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Today, the Obama administration revealed new information that sheds light on the reality of modern warfare, the number of civilians accidentally killed in U.S. airstrikes. JOHN YANG: Today's release is the first time the White House has said how many terrorists and innocent civilians it believes have been killed by airstrikes, including by drones. Between 2009 and 2015, the administration says it launched 473 airstrikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Africa. It estimates that as many as 2,581 combatants, and as many as 116 noncombatants were killed. Now, these numbers do not include airstrikes in Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria, what the administration calls areas of active hostilities.

BMW CEO Krueger has made the boldest promise of any automotive brand about selfSelf-Driving Cars and the Looming Privacy Apocalypse. When he inherited the post, the company had enjoyed 10 hugely successful years following the Strategy NumberCube26: Driving the next wave of innovation. Read more ... » One plan created by his predecessor, Norbert Reithofer. Krueger arrived right as BMW and the overall industry found itself at a crossroads. First, the tremendous growth in sales and profits in China has disappeared so much so that BMW was forced to provide financial relief for dealers who had never before experienced sluggish demand in new car sales.

Talking to WIRED before his speech at WIRED Health, Kyu Rhee, IBM's chief health officer, took from his pocket one of the iconic pieces of medical equipment: the stethoscope. The stethoscope is celebrating its 200th anniversary – the first, monaural version was created by the French doctor René Laennec. Despite technical advances – and the rise of other non-invasive techniques for internal examination – the stethoscope still means "doctor": according to a 2012 research paper, carrying a stethoscope makes a practitioner seem more trustworthy than any other piece of medical equipment. "It's amazing how medicine in some ways still leverages this piece of technology," said Rhee. "But I believe that in the next 200 years a cognitive system like Watson will be a part of every healthcare decision, for every stakeholder." IBM Watson's cognitive approach to computing absorbs data – structured and unstructured – and produces answers.

Artificial intelligence is making rapid progress and has the potential to bring huge benefits to many aspects of our lives, including improved services for sick, elderly or disabled people, disease diagnosis, development of new medicines, perfecting driverless vehicles and resolving problems related to climate change. While AI is expected to contribute to enhancing people's well-being and happiness, it has the potential of doing harm or being used for unethical purposes. The government, scientists, engineers and businesspeople involved in applying AI should push discussions on such questions as the relationship between AI and people and society, and ethical issues involved in the use of AI. Particularly important will be to deepen discussions on how to prevent harm caused by the wrongful use of AI. Such discussions will be indispensable to building public trust in AI and robots.

A group of researchers from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, have created a novel solution for large-scale Android malware detection. It's called DroidOL, and it's an adaptive and scalable malware detection framework based on online learning. "DroidOL's achieves superior accuracy through extracting high quality features from inter-procedural control-flow graphs (ICFGs) of apps, which are known to be robust against evasion and obfuscation techniques adopted by malware," the researchers explained. They used the Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) graph kernel to extract semantic features from ICFGs, and finally, online learning to distinguish between benign and malicious apps. They attribute much of the success of their technique to the use of a scalable online learning classifier instead of batch-learning classifiers (which are not).

Japan is one of the world's most advanced countries in the field of artificial intelligence and robot industries. At the Group of Seven summit Japan hosted in May, world leaders looked amused and fascinated as they watched a robot performing at the International Media Center. At the same time, because of the technological advances and advent of robots, the leaders are concerned that many people in their countries will lose their jobs and cry out for assistance from governments. This kind of downside to innovation has always been a part of modernization. Innovation brings fundamental change, but the impact of AI will be on a far larger scale than ever before.

Picture the scenario: you've been asked to prepare an analysis on whether you have the best people in the right roles in your company and identify where there may be knowledge gaps within the organisation. If your company has offices in New York, London, Berlin and Singapore, that's a huge HR challenge. But what if an artificial intelligence tool can produce in minutes a detailed "knowledge map" based on analysis of employee skills and interests to pinpoint gaps where new hires are needed to fill those holes. British companies are now being offered such "brain technology". Computer software, called Starmind, uses machine learning to understand queries – even anonymously – then source answers from previous staff conversations on a subject or track down experts within the company who are able to help.