Artificially intelligent robots and devices are being taught to be racist, sexist and otherwise prejudiced by learning from humans, according to new research. A massive study of millions of words online looked at how closely different terms were to each other in the text – the same way that automatic translators use "machine learning" to establish what language means. The researchers found male names were more closely associated with career-related terms than female ones, which were more closely associated with words related to the family. This link was stronger than the non-controversial findings that musical instruments and flowers were pleasant and weapons and insects were unpleasant. Female names were also strongly associated with artistic terms, while male names were found to be closer to maths and science ones.

In December, Bank of England governor Mark Carney warned that half of the UK's workforce could be replaced by robots or computers in the coming years. In the insurance industry, we've recently seen Aviva asking its staff if a robot could better perform their job in a bid to increase its competitiveness in our increasingly digital world. Specialist brokers and smaller MGAs often find themselves trapped in manual processes such as rekeying information into multiple systems or manually generating documents and reconciling payments. If your business is significantly more expensive to run than a similar competitor, there is no good outcome in the long run. At best the Christmas Party will always be a low budget event, in the worst-case scenario you could go out of business.

It's surprisingly difficult to come up with a truly random sequence of numbers or items. Doing so requires cognitive skills such as memory and attention, as well as a sense of complexity. "Our brains are wired to find patterns even where there are none – for example, when looking at clouds or stars in the sky," says Hector Zenil at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and the LABORES Research Lab in Paris, France. Zenil and his colleagues have now found that our ability to think up random sequences peaks when we reach 25 before declining with age. This mirrors the evolution and decline of our cognitive abilities, suggesting that monitoring this skill could give an insight into these changes over time. They asked more than 3400 people between the ages of 4 and 91 to complete an online assessment that included five tasks designed to measure their ability to generate random sequences.

There's currently a shortage of over seven million physicians, nurses and other health workers worldwide, and the gap is widening. Doctors are stretched thin -- especially in underserved areas -- to respond to the growing needs of the population. Meanwhile, training physicians and health workers is historically an arduous process that requires years of education and experience. Fortunately, artificial intelligence can help the healthcare sector to overcome present and future challenges. Here's how AI algorithms and software are improving the quality and availability of healthcare services.

In the animal kingdom, acting randomly can be the key to avoiding a grisly fate. After all, if you're a field mouse and a hawk can't predict your next move, your chances for survival are much higher. For human beings, the ability to behave randomly isn't a matter of life or death, but it is an important cognitive skill that reflects our capacity for creativity and problem solving. The bad news is that, according to a new study published in PLOS Computational Biology, our aptitude for making random choices peaks at 25, slowly diminishes until we turn 60, and plummets from that point on. That conclusion, which isn't too surprising given what we know about the aging process, was hard to definitively produce before.

An artificial intelligence tool that has revolutionised the ability of computers to interpret everyday language has been shown to exhibit striking gender and racial biases. The findings raise the spectre of existing social inequalities and prejudices being reinforced in new and unpredictable ways as an increasing number of decisions affecting our everyday lives are ceded to automatons. In the past few years, the ability of programs such as Google Translate to interpret language has improved dramatically. These gains have been thanks to new machine learning techniques and the availability of vast amounts of online text data, on which the algorithms can be trained. However, as machines are getting closer to acquiring human-like language abilities, they are also absorbing the deeply ingrained biases concealed within the patterns of language use, the latest research reveals.

It could be the end of'heavy, noisy trucks with monstrous emissions'. A Swedish startup has unveiled a radical design for a driverless truck that runs entirely on electric power with a range of 124 miles on a single charge. Deemed'cargo with wheels', the'T-pod' is fully autonomous on highways and only needs human intervention when it exits onto local roads - and a human controls it remotely. A Swedish startup has unveiled a radical design for a driverless truck that runs entirely on electric power with a range of 124 miles on a single charge. Deemed'cargo with wheels', the'T-pod' is fully autonomous on highways and only needs human intervention on local roads T-Pod is driverless truck that runs entirely on electric power with a range of 124 miles on a single charge.

In the history of London's Underground rail network (popularly known as Tube), the underground fire hazard incident of 1987 at the King's cross station was one the biggest disasters. It claimed 31 lives and also severely scarred the reputation of London Underground. After multiple inquiries, it was concluded that the fire had started because someone dropped a lit match onto a wooden escalator. But how did such a trivial incident snowball into a full blown disaster? Pulitzer prize-winning author and journalist, Charles Duhigg has analyzed this question in his international bestseller, "The Power of Habit".

The combination of regulation and technology, known as "regtech" these days, was riding high on the agenda at this year's Innovate Finance Global Summit at the Guildhall in London. Because Bitcoin is unlikely to replace the Bank of England this year or next, let's look at what's actually happening in reality, one speaker suggested. Framed as such, all fintech is really regtech, and regulators have become the unlikely instigators of new realms of innovation. The U.K.'s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is an acknowledged leader in this field, especially so in London before a home crowd. Chris Woolard, director of strategy and competition, FCA, said the regulator had copied the way testing was done in the pharmaceutical industry.

Quidditch - the game played by Harry Potter - is now magically appearing in the Oxford Dictionaries, joining that other Potter term "muggle". But what other words dreamed up by author JK Rowling are on the cusp of gaining official recognition? Potterhead... Wrock... Bellatrix... three terms that muggles may not understand. And if you need to be told what a muggle is in the first place, then you can at least consult a dictionary on that one. The BBC has learned that another small list of words associated with the Harry Potter book series are on the Oxford University Press watchlist, which decides on the words likely to gain inclusion in its dictionaries.