The cancer-screening controversy resulting from the CervicalCheck debacle has devastated lives. It has also badly damaged the reputation of some health service organisations and their leadership. Over the last 10 years, some three million tests have been performed on 1.8 million women in Ireland. About 280,000 women per year now undergo the test. It transpires that all these Irish smear slides were manually individually examined.

Think of Wimbledon and your mind will almost inevitably drift to lush green tennis courts, sporting greats, white clothing and possibly a few strawberries and cream. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is probably not in your list, but maybe it should be. The AI, named Watson, is helping the famous tennis tournament reach for the stars. It is an altogether cleverer way of analysing tennis and the mass of data that tennis produces. IBM's system has the ability to understand, reason, learn and interact; it is not a threat to the statistics that lie at the heart of all sports - in fact, they are being used together to provide fans with more insight than ever.

The Russian president has become the latest person to warn of the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI), actually predicting that whoever masters the technology first can rule the world. Addressing students last week, Vladimir Putin said that there are legitimate concerns about AI and that its development will produce "colossal opportunities and threats that are difficult to predict now." Going further, Putin warned that "the one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world." He added: "Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia but for all humankind," according to Russia Today. Putin added that he does not want to see the technology "monopolized," and added that Russia would share it with the world if Moscow develops advanced AI first.

Automotive solutions giant TomTom will be enhancing its Road Trips service using machine learning to tell users what their next road trip should be. Like everything in life, we all have our preference as to what kind of roads we like to drive. Some like rolling hills, others prefer to keep things flat. TomTom's Road Trips is a community-based service which features some routes from TomTom itself but mostly relies on users to submit their own. Within the first week, 350 routes were published.

AI could be your next doctor. AI can now offer health advice as good as what you'd get from a human doctor, says a UK-based startup. Babylon Health said Wednesday that it gave its artificial intelligence technology the same test required of would-be general practitioners in Britain and that the AI performed better than humans. Babylon presented the AI with a sample set of questions testing diagnostic skills, a key component of the exam. The technology scored 81 percent on the exam on its first try, compared to the average score of 72 percent that human doctors have received over the last five years, the company said.

Google devices and apps have experienced serious outages that lasted for more than 12 hours and affected millions of users. The issue affected Google Home and Google Home Mini – speakers that respond to voice commands – as well as Chromecast – a device that plugs into a television and allows people to watch video content. Users were angry at both the length of the outage and the lack of information from Google about it, once it had been identified. Google has not given a reason why these devices went down, only apologising for the service problems and identifying a fix for the issues. The bug meant that when some Google Home owners asked a question of their speaker, it responded: "There was a glitch, try again in a few seconds." If they tried to reset the device, it would sometimes fail to reboot.

"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them" Agreeing on a definition of artificial intelligence can be extremely challenging. Few experts seem to have as many disagreements as for the ones working in this field. At its core, however, AI is a machine behavior that mimics those cognitive functions that we (wrongly) assume are the exclusive preserve of humans and animals. If we accept this simplistic definition, therefore, AI is nothing more than a particular type of intelligence demonstrated by computers, not too dissimilar to the one that me, you or your dog may have.

From autonomous cars to flying taxis to electric-powered aircraft, technological innovations in transportation vehicles seem to be moving faster than Elon Musk's express loop underneath Chicago. But when it comes to regular roads and traffic systems, we still seem to be stuck in the far right lane. The US has the worst traffic on the planet, with Los Angeles drivers leading the race to nowhere by spending an average of 102 hours per year in traffic jams. In 2014, the country spent $165 billion on highway construction, operation, and maintenance, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That can buy a lot of asphalt and concrete, but what else?

BRUSSELS – Member nations of the global chemical weapons watchdog voted Wednesday to give the organization the authority to apportion blame for illegal attacks, expanding its powers following a bitter dispute pitting Britain and its Western allies against Russia and Syria. An 82-24 vote provided the two-thirds majority needed to enlarge the purview of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The organization was created to implement a 1997 treaty that banned chemical weapons, but lacked a mandate to name the parties it found responsible for using them. Many participating nations saw the inability to assign responsibility as a senseless hamstring, especially after fatal chemical attacks during the war in Syria. Russia opposed adding a new license to the agency's portfolio, saying that was a decision that belonged to the United Nations.

The AI era is already here, but many companies see the headlines and assume the rise of intelligent computing is something that only big corporations like Google and IBM are toying with. However, any business can make use of AI technologies thanks to cloud services, to help improve their operations, recruiting, security and even customer services. Is your business ready to take advantage of AI? Artificial intelligence (AI) is all over the news, from this week's article in Fortune as part of a special report. Among other areas, it focuses on how "China's two tech titans are battling for supremacy" to endless others espousing the technology's possibilities. Yet, as shown by recent layoffs at IBM Watson, Ai isn't simple to build.