Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been shaking up many areas of business, from cybersecurity to market analytics, bots and self-driving cars. But when it comes to core corporate functions, especially those where the risks of making bad decisions are substantial, the use of artificial intelligence is still in its early stages. Take, for example, AmerisourceBergen, a drug wholesale company based in Conshohocken, Penn. The company has 19,000 employees in 47 countries, and gross revenues of $147 billion a year, good for 11th on the Fortune 500. Alexander Kugler, the company's VP of pricing, is well aware of the potential of artificial intelligence to help the company make better decisions when it sets prices for its products. Set prices too high, and customers will go elsewhere. Set prices too low, and the company will lose money.

A world dominated by self-driving cars is no longer just possible, it's inevitable. And the proof is everywhere. In Arizona, where Waymo (formerly known as Google's self-driving car project) is testing minivans sans humans inside. In Boston, where Lyft and robocar outfit Nutonomy are schlepping Patriots fans to and fro. In Sweden, where Volvo is testing its autonomous tech on impossibly photogenic families.

When machines speak, they sound stilted, robotic and mechanical – but they're getting better. Google's latest text-to-speech system, called Tacotron 2, generates sounds entirely from scratch, and the search giant claims the results are as good as those built using professional voice artists. Previous systems normally produce speech by assembling human-recorded vocal sounds into words and sentences. In comparison, Tacotron 2 was trained on over 24 hours of human speech and corresponding transcripts, and could then generate completely new audio of phrases from a given text even if it had never seen some of the words before. You can listen to the results here.

In a tale of gambling addiction posted to Reddit shortly before Christmas, the numbers were as shocking as they were unsurprising. First the anonymous addict frittered away $200 (£149), in November 2016. Then $300, $400, $1,500 … eventually, by December 2017, a credit card debt of $16,000, too large to be kept a secret any longer. It's a painful narrative, one that's not softened through repeated telling. What might be more surprising is the particular type of gambling under discussion.

"Jobs Terminatored" is the Sun's headline for a story about how the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence will affect British workers. The paper says the automation revolution will split the country into winners and losers unless the government steps in. The Guardian reports that the machine economy threatens jobs which bring in about a third of the UK's annual pay. It says that leading figures, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, want ministers to manage the adoption of automation better and help people share in the benefits of new technology. Meanwhile, some of the newspaper headlines may make for uncomfortable reading for chief constables.

The UK-based Biogerontology Research Foundation (BGRF), which seeks to apply scientific knowledge of aging to the diseases and debilities of old age, proudly salutes its director and trustee Alex Zhavoronkov PhD, whose aging and drug discovery company Insilico Medicine has been included in the prestigious AI 100 list for 2018, announced by CB Insights this month. These are a select group of private companies working on groundbreaking artificial intelligence technology. "Last year's AI 100 enjoyed amazing success in the year since earning this recognition. This year's list was culled from 1000 applications and looks even more impressive. These are companies using artificial intelligence in industries from drug discovery and cybersecurity to robotics and legal tech. I'm happy that CB Insights is able to shine a light on the founders and companies that will revolutionize these industries and look forward to seeing what they do in 2018 and beyond." said CB Insights CEO Anand Sanwal.

Tech magnates like Elon Musk and Bill Gates have cautioned about the threat of super intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI). While the reality of super intelligence may be a few decades away, contact centers are experiencing the "now" of this technology and asking themselves whether increased automation will also mean an increase in job losses. Chatbots are being used in every industry vertical – retail, automotive, financial services, even healthcare – to replace humans in contact centers. AI is expected to take over around 38% of U.S. jobs by the year 2030. And in the UK, up to 30% of jobs are at risk of being taken over by robots and artificial intelligence by the early 2030s, according to PwC.

Imagine this scenario: Two patients need kidney transplants, and there's only one donor organ available that both their bodies will accept. One is 60 years old but in good health, except for a bout with skin cancer that's now in remission. The other is 30, but a heavy drinker -- a risk factor for kidney recipients. The question of which patient should get the kidney is a thorny one, laced with judgments about age and lifestyle. Currently, decisions like it are often made by committees of doctors who weigh many factors, from a patient's age and medical outlook to the distance an organ would need to travel, in order to match a limited supply of donated organs with the long list of people waiting for a transplant.

Up to half of all jobs in Britain are vulnerable to a revolution in robotic technology and artificial intelligence that threatens to replace human workers with machines, … response to the economic challenge, with the establishment of a regulator to oversee the "ethical use of robotics and artificial intelligence".

A woman has called for better care for young disabled people after her sister had to share a care home with people more than twice her age. Before 38-year-old Joanne Head died in 2015, she had to have 24-hour care due to advanced multiple sclerosis. Her sister Vicky Cook, from Nottingham, said most residents in the home were over 65 and some had dementia. Lincolnshire County Council, who provided the care, said it works with families to find the right placements. Mrs Cook said it was "horrible" to see her sister in an environment where no suitable therapies or social interaction and activities were offered.