The 11th annual MIT Tech Conference, a student-led event organized by the MIT Sloan Tech Club, had "exponential technologies" as its theme this year. Here's what I learned from the event's morning sessions which covered artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing, and biotechnology. Developing computer technology that does not require the use of eyes or hands is "extremely liberating," said Rohit Prasad, Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa at Amazon. The absence of a computer screen forced Prasad and his team to tackle the most difficult problems of speech recognition. The inspiration for Alexa was cloud-based AI, "similar to the Star Trek computer," making it easy for users to walk around the house and get some type of question answered or action performed.

Ken makes a decent living operating a large harvester on behalf of farmer Luke. Ken's salary generates income tax and social security payments that help finance government programmes for less fortunate members of his community. Alas, Luke is about to replace Ken with Nexus, a robot that can operate the harvester longer, more safely, in any weather and without lunch breaks, holidays or sick pay. Bill Gates thinks that, to ease the inequality and offset the social costs implied by automation's displacement effects, either Nexus should pay income tax, or Luke should pay a hefty tax for replacing Ken with a robot. And this "robot tax" should be used to finance something like a universal basic income (UBI).

The UK government is planning to announce new measures to help artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics researchers to commercialise their breakthroughs. The Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) announced on Monday that it will include a number of AI-related proposals in its upcoming Digital Strategy document, which will be unveiled in Parliament on Wednesday. As part of the Digital Strategy, DCMS said it expects to announce an AI review that will be led Southampton University professor Wendy Hall and ex-IBM scientist Jérôme Pesenti, who is now the CEO of London healthcare startup Benevolent.AI. The government is also expected to announce a £17.3 million investment into robotics and AI that will be given to UK universities via the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). "There has been a lot of unwarranted negative hype around AI but it has the ability to drive enormous growth for the UK economy, create jobs, foster new skills, positively transform every industry and retain Britain's status as a world leader in innovative technology," said Hall in a statement.

Other enterprises adopt the "AI-assisted human agent" model to reinforce their existing customer support staff. KLM, the flag carrier airline of the Netherlands, began answering customer inquiries via Facebook Messenger last year. To help lessen the average waiting period before a customer's issue is addressed and resolved, they used DigitalGenius to provide an AI solution layer. In this model, the AI interprets the conversation and suggests response choices to the human agent. The AI adapts the reply format based on the inquiry platform -- elaborating longer in an email and keeping Twitter responses to 140 characters or fewer.

AI just recently began making its way into the public consciousness, but over the next several years it will step in to transform entire industries. Key to this transformation is AI's unlimited capacity to process and analyze mass amounts of data, and then act autonomously on the insights. Compare this to the status quo: We have tons of data but only a limited capacity to put it to work. Having worked in AI for almost a decade, I was able to ask scientists and researchers I've collaborated with--and who are working on AI solutions that exceed what any of us has seen so far--which industries are likely to be transformed by AI first and what that will look like. Based on their answers, here are five industries I think will lead the charge, and how AI will fuel their disruption.

Artificial Intelligence is a niche and fragmented Market and has greater potential in driving future Business Decisions. Artificial intelligence is clearly on the mind of the biggest companies in tech. Of note, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently called the development of artificial intelligence one of his top three key goals over the next 10 years. IBM launched a $100M Watson venture fund in January. And Google has already acquired a handful of AI startups including DeepMind Technologies of the UK for $500M.

Simple mental tests may be able to identify people who are likely to reach the top of their sport. That's according to researchers who showed that elite athletes who play team sports aren't just stronger and faster than the rest of us – some of their cognitive skills are better, too. Young soccer players, competing at the top level in Sweden, performed better than the general population on tests of so-called "executive function". And the better their results, the more goals they scored. Executive function isn't a measure of intelligence – it describes unconscious mental abilities like our working memory, which is involved in manipulating transient information to help us make decisions, and attentional control, which is our ability to choose what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

Ford has revealed its'Autolivery' concept for what it calls the'city of tomorrow', and envisions a future in which packages are delivered to houses by self-driving vans and drones. The motoring firm believes the system would streamline the delivery process, as the vans would be capable of transporting a large number of goods to an area, while the aircraft would be responsible for completing the final leg of the journey. Drones are both speedier than humans and capable of accessing destinations that cars can't, such as flats in tower blocks or venues without parking spaces. "Widely considered the most challenging part of the goods delivery process to automate, many companies are working on how to solve the complexity of delivering packages the last 15 metres, or from kerb to door," said Ford. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

HELSINKI, Finland -- February 23, 2017 -- Comptel Corporation (OMX Helsinki: CTL1V) announced today that it's Fastermind has gained significant momentum since its launch at Nexterday North in November 2016. Fastermind provides artificial intelligence capabilities to digital service providers, enabling them to recommend, predict and automate real-time decisions, particularly supporting customer engagement automation. According to new research conducted by Comptel, today's mobile customers want to be treated as individuals by their service provider. Surveying 2,000 mobile data users in the US and the UK, the research found that while more than half of mobile data customers (55 percent) are eager to receive more proactive, personalised messages and services, fewer than one in seven (13 percent) have ever actually received this kind of communication from their carrier. Operators can respond to this demand for personalisation by using Fastermind to reach their customers at the right time, with the right messages, through automated marketing offers and service notifications.

One of Britain's biggest companies is to ask its workers whether their jobs could be better done by a robot. The insurance giant Aviva says employees who answer "yes" will be retrained for another role at the firm.