O2 is seeking to cut costs in its customer service operation by encouraging people to talk to a new artificially intelligent robot rather than contact its call centres. The mobile operator's parent company, the Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica, unveiled the new voice recognition technology, called Aura, at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona. The system is scheduled to be introduced in the UK in the next year and is designed to answer customers' questions about their account, such as how much of their monthly data allowance is left or what their next bill will be. Customers will also be able ask to add new services, such as a roaming package, or cancel them, without speaking to a person. Mark Evans, O2's chief executive, said Aura represented the next stage of the company's efforts to encourage customers to serve themselves if they have a basic inquiry.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has long captured people's imaginations. It has been a theme of science fiction novels and films for more than half a century and, while reality has always seemed a long way behind the fiction, that is now changing. AI is finally living up to its promise and has the potential to improve almost every aspect of our lives. Indeed, entire industries of which we cannot yet conceive might be created. Britain now has an opportunity to become the world-leader in this technology, to shape the revolution, create thousands of jobs, and transform lives for the better.

Artificial intelligence and robotics are one of the biggest potential risks to humankind of emerging technologies, according to a new report from the World Economic Forum. But, the development of such technology, which is expected to disrupt everything from the world of work to geopolitics, could also conversely bring the biggest benefits to the world. There must be a trade off between innovation and regulation as well as innovation and security, said John Drzik, president of global risks and specialities at Marsh, one of the contributors to the World Economic Forum's 2017 Global Risks Report. New technologies were identified as having deep connections with social, political and economic challenges in the world, with deeper study in this year's report after first being identified as a risk in focus in 2015. "They can exacerbate some of the risk and they can provide solutions to the risks as well," said Margareta Drzeniek-Hanouz, head of global competitiveness and risks at the WEF.

One of the best features of the Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones is the Google Assistant, Google's own voice-activated assistant that competes with Apple's Siri. With today's announcement however, it looks like Google Assistant will be available on more devices starting this week. The great thing about Google Assistant is that it allows users to talk to their Pixel and Pixel XL phones in a conversational or natural way. Whether it's asking questions, making reservations and appointments, Google Assistant is can do it all. It has proven to be quite an impressive AI assistant and has even been lauded by some as even being smarter than Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana.

Current research projects show that artificial intelligence (AI) can help us solving global problems for the greater good of mankind. Despite the headlines presenting crashes involving self-driving cars, the applications of AI technology in this area could dramatically reduce injuries and deaths on the roads. Self-driving cars could also change our lifestyles. Thanks to this emerging technology, we will have more time to entertain ourselves of work during commutes. The decreased cognitive load and the increased comfort provided by shared transportation and self-driving may also affect where people choose to live.

It's probably the most unusual question asked in a staff survey: Could a robot do your job better than you? Whether or not the 16,000 British workers at the insurance company Aviva will reply honestly remains to be seen. Those who do answer "yes" have been told that they will be retrained for another role in the company. Many other employers have introduced automation into the workplace but without any form of consultation. Staff who work in call centres, assess customers' credit ratings and calculate the price of insurance policies are most likely to have to retrain, research suggests.

Elon Musk is arguably one of the most influential inventors of our modern age. Head of both Tesla and SpaceX, he is at once a pioneer, entrepreneur, environmentalist, and disruptor extraordinaire. Here are 12 books he recommends. Been meaning to get educated on AI? This Huffington Post Definitive Tech Book of 2013 will help you grasp the far-reaching implications of artificial intelligence on human life and our world as a whole. Based on newly released personal letters of Einstein, this is an utterly engrossing, comprehensive biography of Albert Einstein.

A thought occurs to me oftentimes in the quiet hours of the morning. What if I had more time like this through the day? How will I spend it? What will it be in pursuit of? Will it be in the pursuit of money?

Federico Antoni is managing partner at ALLVP, an early-stage VC based in Mexico. He is a lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "Over the last couple of years, a billion new people have joined the super-connected world. Billions more around the developing world, now, walk with a high-speed computer in their pockets. And yet, they don't have a bank account, a formal education or access to most of the services we take for granted in the U.S. Imagine the possibilities… imagine how you can change the lives of billions of people."

Bike Sharing Systems (BSSs) are widely adopted in major cities of the world due to concerns associated with extensive private vehicle usage, namely, increased carbon emissions, traffic congestion and usage of nonrenewable resources. In a BSS, base stations are strategically placed throughout a city and each station is stocked with a pre-determined number of bikes at the beginning of the day. Customers hire the bikes from one station and return them at another station. Due to unpredictable movements of customers hiring bikes, there is either congestion (more than required) or starvation (fewer than required) of bikes at base stations. Existing data has shown that congestion/starvation is a common phenomenon that leads to a large number of unsatisfied customers resulting in a significant loss in customer demand. In order to tackle this problem, we propose an optimisation formulation to reposition bikes using vehicles while also considering the routes for vehicles and future expected demand. Furthermore, we contribute two approaches that rely on decomposability in the problem (bike repositioning and vehicle routing) and aggregation of base stations to reduce the computation time significantly. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our approach by comparing against two benchmark approaches on two real-world data sets of bike sharing systems. These approaches are evaluated using a simulation where the movements of customers are generated from real-world data sets.