In 2014 the world came into contact with Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the home with the release of Amazon Echo. This type of personal AI had been introduced previously in the mega-hit movie "Iron Man' with the AI system called "Jarvis." The main character Tony Stark uses Jarvis for anything he needs executed: lighting, television, phone calls, dinner orders, simple chores and computer data analysis. Up to a few years ago, people thought this was only possible in movies and fiction. One start-up company in New Jersey attempted to reinterpret and repurpose existing leisure drones with an added benefit of AI.

Nintendo says the retro version of one of its iconic video game platforms is making a comeback in 2019. The 8-bit NES Classic went on sale last year selling 1.5 million units, but the Japanese gaming firm shocked fans by mysteriously pulling the plug on production in April. The company now says its NES Classic Edition will now return next summer due to popular demand. Nintendo says the retro version of one of its iconic video game platforms will return to stores next year. The Japanese announced in April that it had ended production of the nostalgic NES classic, re-released in November 2016 and selling around 1.5 million units The Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, was an 8-bit home video game console initially released in Japan as the Family Computer, or Famicom, on July 15, 1983.

Computers are taking over our world. This may sound like a crazy rant from a paranoid old-man but the advent of virtual reality slowly and gradually is nudging us along the line of increased tech dependence. Brain-computer interfaces are integral in furthering the human-AI interactions. The BCIs could serve as the software interface medium to stabilize human action controlling robots. The BCI interface uses an EEG cap to measure brain signals.

The new iPhone X puts face recognition front and centre. Because it is the quickest and easiest way to unlock your phone. Before you've even thought about placing your finger on the scanner or entering a PIN, the camera will have already processed your face, checked it's you, and granted access. Despite its handiness, however, the technology is far from proven. Apple keeps its algorithms under lock and key, meaning we don't know for sure how well they work, but even the best in the business have woefully low reliability.

Chiranjit Chakraborty, data scientist in the advanced analytics division of the Bank of England, and Robin Grosset, chief technology officer at MindBridge, join Oliver Thew, programmes manager at OMFIF. They discuss the impact of artificial intelligence and machine learning on financial services and the wider economy, taking into account its use in the detection of fraud, analysing regulatory data, and the consequences of automation on the job market.

Sophia Genetics, a big data analytics company that's using artificial intelligence (AI) to help medical professionals diagnose and treat patients through genomic analysis, has raised $30 million in a round of funding led by Balderton Capital, with participation from 360 Capital Partners, Invoke Capital, and Alychlo. Founded out of Switzerland in 2011, Sophia Genetics sells itself as "the most advanced artificial intelligence AI for data-driven medicine." Its platform learns from thousands of patients' genomic profiles to improve and expedite patient diagnosis across oncology, hereditary cancer, metabolic disorders, pediatrics, and cardiology. The company said that its AI technology is currently being used by more than 300 hospitals in 53 countries, and it has already analyzed the genomic profiles of more than 125,000 patients. Prior to now, Sophia Genetics had raised around $30 million in funding, and with its latest cash injection the company said that it plans to further develop its technology, recruit top talent, and grow hospitals' adoption of clinical genomics testing.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing at lightning pace, but there has been an inconclusive focus on its real impact on employment and the way we learn. Whilst these new technologies can improve the speed, quality and cost of available goods and services, we don't yet know the extent to which they may also displace large numbers of workers. According to Oxford University economists Dr Carl Frey and Dr Michael Osborne, 40% of all jobs are at risk of being lost to computers in the next two decades. Understandably, headlines like these are unsettling and leave many people worried about what will happen if robots do end up taking multiple jobs from humans. In the education sector, there are further predictions that intelligent machines could replace the best teachers of the future.

I have a confession to make. I'm a privacy lawyer who researches the risks of face recognition technology – and I will be buying the new iPhone. Apple's next generation smartphone will unlock using face recognition, thanks to infrared and 3D sensors within its front-facing camera. Reports indicate that the face scan and unlock system will be almost instantaneous and require no buttons to be pressed, being always "on" and ready to read your face. Android users can expect similar face unlock features as well.

As we head deeper into the 21st century, we're starting to catch a glimpse of the fantastic technological possibilities that await. But we're also starting to get a grim sense of the potential horrors. Here are 10 frightening technologies that should never, ever, come into existence. As I was putting this list together, it became obvious to me that many of the technologies described below could be put to tremendously good use. It was important, therefore, for me to make the distinction between a technology per se and how it might be put to ill use. Once developed, it could be used to end scarcity, clean-up the environment, and rework human biology.

Robots are going to have to work together if they want to destroy us, their soft, fallible masters. But the current paradigm of having a Skynet-like (or rather, Zerglike) overmind control a set of semi-autonomous drones is too easy to beat -- take out the brain and the rest fail, right? Not if they're all the brain, which is the idea demonstrated in a wonderful new paper, "Mergeable nervous systems for robots." The admiration of the authors for our shining, pitiless destroyers is evident from the get-go. Robots have the potential to display a higher degree of lifetime morphological adaptation than natural organisms.