Jarosław Gowin, who is a deputy prime minister as well as minister of science and higher education, said that Polish companies dealing with artificial intelligence had been on the market for 25 years. He added that Poland had talented young mathematicians and IT specialists. Gowin was speaking during the Impact'18 conference in the southern Polish city of Kraków earlier this week. An encounter with humanoid robot Sophia, developed by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics and appearing in Poland for the first time, was one of the highlights of the two-day gathering. Thousands of people attended the conference to debate innovation and digital trends.

The problem with all new hotel technology, unfortunately, is that innovation gets turned into buzzwords quickly, usually in order to sell more products and services. Even worse, all these buzzwords are thrown into the same marketing pot, creating a vast confusion that only "experts" can understand. With this article and accompanying infographic, we will demystify this subject of artificial intelligence (AI) and explain, in plain terms, what it is and what it means for hotels. This guide was created with the intention of clarifying the most important terms and concepts related to artificial intelligence and shedding some light on what AI really means for hotels, without technicalities and by providing easy-to-understand industry examples. Note: This article is also available as a PDF to download here. "What is a lobby boy? A lobby boy is completely invisible, yet always in sight. A lobby boy remembers what people hate. A lobby boy anticipates the client's needs before the needs are needed".

An intelligent machine capable of anticipating your next move minutes in advance sounds like the stuff of nightmares – but is now a reality. Researchers have taught an AI to recognise patterns in people's actions, allowing it to accurately predict the next move in a sequence minutes in advance. The software, which was built by a team at the University of Bonn in Germany, was taught to anticipate actions by watching hours of cooking videos. Dr Jürgen Gall believes the intelligent software will eventually be able to prophesize your actions'hours before they happen'. If the team manages to fine-tune the algorithm to be able to anticipate actions that far in advance, it's possible to imagine a slew of real-world application, from home automation gadgets, to Big Brother-esque surveillance.

The voice-activated gadget in the corner of your bedroom suddenly laughs maniacally, and sends a recording of your pillow talk to a colleague. The clip of Peppa Pig your toddler is watching on YouTube unexpectedly descends into bloodletting and death. The social network you use to keep in touch with old school friends turns out to be influencing elections and fomenting coups. Something strange has happened to our way of thinking – and as a result, even stranger things are happening to the world. We have come to believe that everything is computable and can be resolved by the application of new technologies. But these technologies are not neutral facilitators: they embody our politics and biases, they extend beyond the boundaries of nations and legal jurisdictions and increasingly exceed the understanding of even their creators. As a result, we understand less and less about the world as these powerful technologies assume more control over our everyday lives. Across the sciences and society, in politics and education, in warfare and commerce, new technologies are not merely augmenting our abilities, they are actively shaping and directing them, for better and for worse. If we do not understand how complex technologies function then their potential is more easily captured by selfish elites and corporations.

Off the coast of Malta, Chris Clark was sitting on a small boat waiting for his underwater robot to talk to him. It was autonomously exploring the sea bed hunting for signs of a wreckage, but was unable to relay what it had found until it surfaced. "We could have gone back to shore, but we prefer to sit out there babysitting it, chit chatting and hypothesising about what it might find," says Clark at Harvey Mudd College in California.

A seven-foot-tall robot arm moves in a blur, carrying a piece of metal about the size of a bowling ball from one workbench to another at superhuman speed. But when a human worker reaches for the piece, the robot goes into slow motion and then eventually stops. The machine and the young man are assembling a car suspension together. To anyone familiar with industrial robots, this seems insane. Industrial robots are capable of killing a person.

This seems pretty straightforward, until you start thinking about how you might actually deploy this - and about the fact that some places are easier to drive in than others. As we can already see with the early tests being done with prototype autonomous cars (with their need for a human'safety driver', today these are are effectively L2 or at best L3), autonomy of any kind in one city is different to another - Phoenix is easier than San Francisco, which is easier than Naples or Moscow. This variability applies not just across different cities and countries but also in different parts of each urban landscape: freeways are easier than city centers, which might be easier or harder than suburbs. It naturally follows that we will have vehicles that will reliably reach a given level of autonomous capability in some ('easy') places before they can do it everywhere. These will have huge safety and economic benefits, so we'll deploy them - we won't wait and do nothing at all until we have a perfect L5 car that can drive itself around anywhere from Kathmandu to South Boston.

"Running a lot faster" is something big tech firms could teach banks that are yet to dip their toes in using artificial intelligence (AI), says Adam Shardlow, Lead Journey Manager for AI at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), who has previously also worked for Amazon. He believes AI and machine learning (ML) makes it possible for financial institutions to personalize their offers and revolutionize the way they communicate with customers. We sat down to discuss the opportunities AI offers to banks to get a single view of the customer, enhance customer relations and boost digital sales. Adam is going to be one of the speakers at W.UP's upcoming free webinar on AI & ML on 27 June, where we will share best practices in AI that banks can put into practice with little effort. Participants will also learn all about developing AI capabilities to increase digital sales, unlocking the power of ML in analytics, real-life use cases of AI in digital banking and innovations that help banks explore AI and provide five-star user experiences.

In the 18th century home craft textile workers were displaced by mass production in organized factories. Some of these displaced workers destroyed knitting equipment in these new factories. In England, Ned Ludd, also known as Capitain Ludd or King Ludd, the mythical leader of the Luddites, was the inspiration of a widespread effort to destroy factory equipment and return to the cottage industry that had sustained local economies before the development of the steam engine and the industrial revolution. Industrialization destroyed early cottage economies, but today, advanced technology and the slowing of semiconductor scaling may bring about a renaissance of cottage industry. This is the result of minimizing the cost of technology development with new cloud-based tools and internet enabled supply chains.

There are gonna be lots of fights, celebrations, and posts all over social media. The craze is all over again. With the ardent following, people predict their own outcomes with emotions as the base. We are under the digital revolution and probably in pre-machine age. They are long past and forgotten.