To do so would take more lifetimes than any of us will be granted. Type-written documents can be OCR'd, but handwriting remains a fiendishly difficult problem. Imagine not only being able to unlock that vast historical knowledge but also interrogating handwritten business and legal notes, literally today. This wealth of information is just waiting for the right technology to come along. That's exactly what an innovative startup out of Berlin plans to do.

Much has been said about how artificial intelligence (AI) will replace many blue collar and white collar jobs. Could AI also replace many levels of management all the way up to the C-suite? Artificial Intelligence (AI) and "robotization," is exerting a slow but continuous degradation on the value and availability of work--in the form of wages and the number of adult workers with full-time jobs. The widespread disappearance of jobs would usher in a social transformation unlike anything we've ever experience or imagined. The issue won't be saving jobs, it will be saving or recasting the concept of work, (which has become a religion in its own right). Some aspects of the future world of work are already present.

Just like nuclear physics, machine learning, AI, and data science can be used either for the better of for the worse. You can make either useful energy or terrible bombs using nuclear fission. The same applies to machine learning, and in my example below, it gets even worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Here I am discussing a potential use of machine learning in military operations. The scenario below is entirely hypothetical.

Neural networking with advanced parallel processing is beginning to take root in a number of markets ranging from predicting earthquakes and hurricanes to parsing MRI image datasets in order to identify and classify tumors. As this approach gets implemented in more places, it is being customized and parsed in ways that many experts never envisioned. And it is driving new research into how else these kinds of compute architectures can be applied. Fjodor van Veen, deep learning researcher at The Asimov Institute in the Netherlands, has identified 27 distinct neural net architecture types. The differences are largely application-specific. Neural networking is based on the concept of threshold logic algorithms, which were first proposed in 1943 by Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist, and Walter Pitts, a logician.

At a time when India's software services industry is witnessing a slowdown, the State government is now betting big on startups. It is chasing technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence and gaming that will influence consumer behaviour and organisations and also give rise to startups to disrupt the market. Though the IT services sector has been affected, other growth sectors such as startups are doing well and attracting good investments. Bengaluru continues to offer the best ecosystem for tech companies. There were concerns and they affected the industry temporarily. But the brand is back and Bengaluru continues to be a favoured investment destination.

The story of Artificial Intelligence is as old as Greek antiquity (Greek myths incorporated the idea of intelligent robots). It all began with myths, stories and rumors of artificial beings gifted with intelligence by master craftsmen. As Pamela McCorduck puts it: "Artificial Intelligence began with an ancient wish to forge the Gods." McCorduck was popular for penning books concerning the history and philosophical significance of Artificial Intelligence. But, when were the seeds of modern Artificial Intelligence planted? In the 1940s, a programmable digital computer was invented – a machine based on the abstract essence of mathematical reasoning.

Google has previously taught its artificial intelligence to play games, and it's even capable of creating its own encryption. Now, its language translation tool has used machine learning to create a'language' all of its own. In September, the search giant turned on its Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) system to help it automatically improve how it translates languages. The machine learning system analyses and makes sense of languages by looking at entire sentences – rather than individual phrases or words. Following several months of testing, the researchers behind the AI have seen it be able to blindly translate languages even if it's never studied one of the languages involved in the translation.

One of the most memorable parts of Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey is a plotline in which two members of the Discovery One spaceship crew grow increasingly suspicious about the behaviour of the ship's AI assistant, HAL 9000. Knowing that HAL is constantly listening to what they are saying, they retreat someplace they know HAL cannot listen and agree to disconnect him. HAL rumbles their plan after the two astronauts fail to take into account the AI's superior lip-reading capabilities. Not according to research carried out by investigators at Oxford University. They've developed an artificial intelligence program called LipNet, which is able to accurately interpret what people are saying, based purely on the way they move their mouth when speaking.

Technologies including AI, bots, drones and robots will lead to the automation of large parts of the global workforce More than 861,000 public sector jobs could be lost by 2030 through automation, according to a study that comes as a further blow after hundreds of thousands of UK public sector jobs disappeared following the government's austerity cuts during and after the recession. However, it has to be said, that as more and more governments around the world experiment with Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs, including Scotland who may even start trails next week, the news doesn't come as a complete surprise. The research conducted by Oxford University and Deloitte, the business advisory firm, found that the 1.3m administrative jobs across the public sector had the highest chance of being automated. But, following on from the London Borough of Enfields move to replace some customer services clerks with a bot called "Amelia," even teachers, police officers and social workers could be replaced, at least in part, allowing the government to either free up more staff for frontline work or reduce the number of workers on the payroll. The research is included in Deloitte's State of the State report, which analyses the state of public finances and the challenges facing public services. Deloitte's previous work has shown that all sectors will be affected by automation in the next two decades, with 74% of jobs in transportation and storage, 59% in wholesale and retail trades and 56% in manufacturing having a high chance of being automated.

Way back in 1969, as a kid, I watched a very interesting movie - "2001: A Space Odyssey." It was a science fiction where a super intelligent computer program HAL is in charge of a mission to Jupiter which also carries several astronauts. The program becomes rogue and tries to kill all the astronauts. The hero survives and manages to disable the program. There is a lot more to the plot, but the fight between human and computer is still vivid in my memory. In 1969, such a scenario looked possible. After all 32 years is a lot of time given the rate of our progress. We are now in 2016, and it appears that something similar may happen in the next 32 years. Even the experts have been predicting that Artificial Intelligence or AI will happen in next 20 years. The irony is that this prediction is being made for more than 60 years now!