Dating back to the 1960s, before the internet, MIT Professor Joseph Weizenbaum created the first ever chatbot. He designed a programme to copy human conversation by pairing scripted responses to text users entered into a computer and thus the chatbot was born. Becoming more conversational since the early days, Chatbots have revolutionised the customer experience with instant, personalised responses. Although they still lack some human aspects and the responses are not always perfect, we are able to see how beneficial they can be. In the past few years we've seen an increase in Artificial Intelligence chatbots across social platforms such as Facebook, when it launched bots for messenger in 2016, to voice experiences with smart speakers, such as the Amazon Alexa.

A majority of people think that artificial intelligence will steal jobs away from human workers. In a recent survey conducted by Quartz, more than 1,600 respondents in 84 countries said that half of positions would be made redundant by automation in the next five years. A separate survey conducted by Gallup in the U.S. found that 75 percent of adults believe AI will "eliminate more jobs than it creates." "[AI is] superhuman, and we think [it] will be in every industry [and] replace 50 percent of human jobs," Kai-Fu Lee, founder of VC firm Sinovation Ventures, told CNBC in an interview last April. "It is the decision engine that will replace people."

Grand Theft Auto has revealed its "After Hours" update, allowing players to run their own nightclubs. The new content – which will come to the online multiplayer part of the game on 24 July – features real DJs and the return of much loved characters. As with all GTA updates, the software will come free to anyone who has Grand Theft Auto 5 on PC, Xbox One or PlayStation 4. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

While technological progress has always been a driving factor for societies, AI-based technologies stand out as a game changer. Offering vast opportunities for the benefit of people, they have the power to significantly influence the exercise of human rights and to disrupt the functioning of democratic institutions. Effects are transversal and evident in all spheres, as AI gadgets are becoming part of daily routines, gradually able to predict, reinforce and possibly control human behaviours. The Council of Europe, the continent's leading human rights organisation, is addressing the impacts of AI on human rights, democracy and the rule of law. The Council of Europe has identified AI as a subject deserving its closest attention.

Currently, any Chatbot interaction or Alexa discussion is focused purely on the context of the words, as the software tries to understand what we are asking. However, Emotional AI is coming to add depth to the conversation. It will make use of visual and verbal cues to better understand our state of mind, and adjust the conversation. If you think this is sci-fi, IBM used AI tools that monitored players' emotions at Wimbledon to help automatically create highlights packages for tennis fans. And, as chatbots continue to roll out across the business and services globally, helping speed up customer support, taking bookings and driving sales with increasing efficiency, there's a pressing need to better understand us.

Speaking at the recent SAPICS Conference in Cape Town, Dull revealed how AI in the form of IBM Watson is being used to aid decision making in public health supply chains in developing countries and improve patients' access to life-saving medicines. She contends that the big challenges in these markets are using data to make better decisions and influencing skills. "Today's AI technology offers the solution, allowing us to leverage cognitive capabilities to create a transparent, intelligent and predictive supply chain. We asked ourselves what could be achieved if we could get IBM Watson to place chatbots on the platforms available to health workers in African supply chains, so that people can improve their learning." An AI powered chatbot can deliver personalised learning on mobile devices to enhance the supply chain skills of the health workers that staff most African healthcare supply chains.

For many people, Google is the internet. It now dominates almost all aspects of our online lives, from how we search for information, to how we navigate from one place to another. But the route Google has taken to achieve this supremacy has been ruthless, illegal and occasionally unconventional. For 85 per cent of smartphone users that have Google's Android mobile operating system, the slew of apps that come pre-installed on the device are often owned by Google. This includes the popular Chrome web browser and Google search engine, meaning users are forced to download competing apps through the Google Play Store if they want to use them.

Disruptive forces – open banking regulations, growing FinTech ecosystems, and increasing demand for a seamless customer experience – are forcing banks to make significant investments in digital technologies. To effectively compete, banks must move away from being perceived as physical structures that offer financial services/products to an ambient fabric that connects people and businesses. They must transition from a transactional, product-centric approach to an intelligence-oriented customer-centric model centered around customers' journeys. Artificial Intelligence (AI), API-enabled open banking architecture, and cloud are fast-becoming the foundations of banks' IT architecture. In order to evaluate and measure how organizations are faring in their leverage of digital technologies, Everest Group several years ago developed the Digital Effectiveness Assessment model.

For the third time Netflix organized its Personalization, Recommendation and Search Workshop. It was awesome to get invited for this event during my tech holiday in the San Francisco Bay Area. The experienced data scientists from all over Silicon Valley and beyond made it a knowledge-rich day. Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, and University of Minnesota shared how to understand and serve your users better. There was one subject that all speakers agreed on: classic matrix factorization (collaborative filtering) reached its expiration date. This includes challenges of multi-armed bandits, an implicit feedback approach, top-N ranking techniques, tyranny of the majority and algorithmic bias. At Netflix almost your whole homepage is personalized: the banner, carousels, order, artwork, text and search. That is why they state that a good recommender system considers: what, how, when and where a title is recommended.

In this piece I'm being a little bit selfish and talking about a game that I made for a change and how AI and procedural generation can build scalable and flexible level generation systems. Sure Footing is an infinite running platforming game developed by my company Table Flip Games and takes the infinite running template seen in flash and mobile games and expands upon it. The resulting game carries a dynamic, scaling and reactive procedural generation system that not only changes the world as you play, but makes decisions to change its own internal decision making and tweaks parameters based on player performance. The goal of Sure Footing is to allow for players to find a play style and pace that suits them as they race through the generated worlds: not just with the variety of characters, costumes and power-ups but also the difficulty of the level generation system itself - allowing players to treat it as a mild-paced platformer all the way to an intense twitch runner. In this piece I'm going to talk about how it all started, the academic research that inspired it, the AI that controls the bad guys and most importantly the procedural generation engine that powers the entire game. The engine manages not just how segments of the world are created, but how we modulate the scale of generation over time, how difficulty is encoded and makes changes at runtime to try and keep players engaged as best as possible.