Groceries, toys and flowers are no longer the only things filling UK-based Ocado's massive Hampshire warehouse. In the two years since the company started branding itself as the world's largest online-only supermarket, the distribution center has begun teeming with robots steered by algorithms that control the logistics side of the company's 24/7 grind. Now, frozen meat and canned tomatoes are sorted and picked up by robots, which allows the customer service team to deliver them to the doorstep more quickly. The explosion of AI in e-commerce has allowed online retail giants to explore advanced technologies. As firms in the e-commerce industry continue to expand and cater to a growing number of customers, the need for an automated system to streamline their operations has become one of their top investment priorities.

"The truck regarded them calmly, its receptors blank and impassive. It was doing its job. The planet-wide network of automatic factories was smoothly performing the task imposed on it five years before, in the early days of the Total Global Conflict." Written by famous and farsighted Phillip K. Dick in 1955, his central characters, three human survivors of the War, fight these factories and finally succeed in regaining control by eventually turning them against each other and thus making them destroying themselves. Above scenario describes a world in which humans constantly struggle to outsmart machines that are as smart as mice.

Professor Tony Prescott explains why technology will be critical to us all as we age. My interest in this is both as an ageing UK citizen and as a technologist. I have spent much of the last 25 years trying to solve problems in artificial intelligence and robotics. In 2011, I was invited to lead a European working group on the potential societal impacts of robotics. We quickly decided to focus on the possible use of robots to address the Europe-wide demographic shift.

Just last month on June 22 and 23, the United Nations Public Service Forum 2017 took place in The Hague to celebrate public service delivery and to discuss how innovation is shaping the government of the future as well as how to accelerate such innovation. With the ever-increasing amount of data collected through a wide variety of sources and sensors, the potential for computers to learn from this data and take over certain tasks is increasing. Although the potential of technological innovations is often overrated in the short term, it seems that AI is treated as the "shiny new typewriter" of which we should be wary. AI is perceived to have the potential to accomplish much of the valuable work currently done by humans, specifically routine work where humans make an assessment within one second. One should avoid giving the computer too much autonomy in case it runs loose and acts outside the interest of the humans it serves, or creates its own bias in the form of discrimination.

Futuristic predictions of artificial intelligence in healthcare depict robots serving as doctors and nurses. But that fantasy is far from what's possible today. Even Mayo Clinic CIO Cris Ross said as much at HIMSS this year, noting that AI is "still pretty dumb" and comparing it to a 2-year-old. Still, the power of machine learning in healthcare can be leveraged in simpler ways outside the imaginative wishes of society. One startup called Avaamo is bringing AI chatbots to the space.

According to CEO Kaisa Helminen, Fimmic Ltd is a software company that operates in the medical sector. The company provides software solutions that utilize artificial intelligence (AI) and machine vision in tissue section analytics. Fimmic's staff consists of professionals from various fields who have comprehensive knowledge of medicine and software development, as well as solid experience in deep learning AI technologies and life science business. Fimmic's software solutions are originally based on inventions created by the company's Chief Scientific Officer Johan Lundin and his brother, Director of Concept Design, Mikael Lundin. The brothers, who are both medical doctors, originally developed the cloud-based software platform for research use, to speed up the analysis and sharing of extremely large microscope images taken from tissues sections.

You've heard all the forecasts: Robots are going to take away our jobs (possibly even within five years, according to new PricewaterhouseCoopers research) as artificial intelligence turns the world on its head. Earlier this year, The Economist surveyed 200 executives and found that 75% of them plan to implement AI in their businesses within the next three years. Google and Microsoft have also both announced shifts from mobile-first to AI-first this year and the skillset of Amazon's Alexa has tripled over two quarters. AI will obviously play a huge role in the future, but one thing the technology offers marketers today is a way to offer superior customer experiences. Looking beyond the tech giants, here are five consumer brands utilizing AI in innovative and interesting ways.

A healthcare revolution is being predicted after the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics (ECR) received new funding. Researchers there are using artificial intelligence to create robots that will learn from their environment, each other - and us. The ECR is a joint initiative between Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh. Its new Robotarium will open later this year thanks to £8m of support from the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Now the EPSRC is giving almost £1m more to develop four new robots that will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to transform healthcare and emergency response.

America's military budget, at $615 billion, dwarfs those of its closest competitors, China ($211 billion) and Russia ($69 billion). Even with that advantage, a new report finds that the U.S. is at risk of falling behind in the race to find and create AI for military applications. In 2014, U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced that his department intended to lead the coming AI revolution with what he called the "Third Offset Strategy." For the uninitiated, the Second Offset Strategy was in response to the buildup of conventional forces along the Central European front by the Soviet Union and its satellite states ... which itself was a response to the First Offset Strategy that had the U.S. putting its own forces in the field. America didn't want to match the Soviets soldier for soldier, so new technology like long-range sensors and a new generation of guided munitions and submunitions was developed to give the U.S. an edge.

Would you like to join the merry band of researchers breaking machine learning models? A trio of German researchers has published a tool designed to make it easier to craft adversarial models when you're attacking a "black box". Unlike adversarial models that attack AIs "from the inside", attacks developed for black boxes could be used against closed system like autonomous cars, security (facial recognition, for example), or speech recognition (Alexa or Cortana). The tool, called Foolbox, is currently under review for presentation at next year's International Conference on Learning Representations (kicking off at the end of April). Wieland Brendel, Jonas Rauber and Matthias Bethge of the Eberhard Karls University Tubingen, Germany explained at arXiv that Foolbox is a "decision-based" attack called a boundary attack which "starts from a large adversarial perturbation and then seeks to reduce the perturbation while staying adversarial".