It used to be that the future was so bright you had to wear shades. This was the case for maybe a couple of decades (the final two, as it happens, of the 20th century), but then, unfortunately, the sun went in and it shows no sign of returning. The earlier, pre-shades future was very different from the current, post-shades one, but they're both apocalyptic in nature. Back in the Cold War era, it was the possible destruction of all known life on earth resulting from the use of nuclear weapons. Today, it is the possible elimination of all significant human agency from the bio- and techno-spheres resulting from the exponential proliferation of artificial intelligence.

Speaking at the DATAVERSITY Smart Data Online 2016 Conference, Adrian Bowles, industry analyst, recovering academic, and founder of STORM Insights, and Steve Ardire, Merchant of Light, both talked about the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI). They addressed the question: "Will robots take my job?" The short answer could be summarized as: "Maybe." Lower level jobs with easily improved productivity are likely candidates for automated replacements, says Bowles, but higher level positions with decision making capacity are more likely to have assistance from AI, rather than being replaced by it. Bowles talked about recently going through the stack of books he used early in his AI studies and discovering that "nowhere in these books is the key phrase'Machine Learning,' and yet today, that's sort of at the center of everything we're doing."

In less than a decade, Uber has redefined the idea of flexible labor and gutted the American taxi industry. The company launched a fleet of self-driving cars in Pittsburgh. Within a decade, according to a 99-page white paper released today, Uber will have a network--to be called "Elevate"--of on-demand, fully electric aircraft that take off and land vertically. Instead of slogging down the 101, you and a few other flyers will get from San Francisco to Silicon Valley in about 15 minutes--for the price of private ride on the ground with UberX. These aren't flying cars in the sense that they both drive on the ground and soar through the air.

Apple is about to release a whole new range of computers. They might be the most important Macs released in recent years – and could decide the near future of Apple. The new computers come at an important time for the company, just days after it reported its worst results in 15 years and said that it wouldn't be able to deliver the EarPods that had been the centre of its plan for the wireless future. And they come at an important time for the Mac, too: many models haven't been meaningfully updated for years, with fans of the computers worrying that more attention is being paid to the iPhones and iPad. The event will be Apple's big chance to turn around all of those worries with new technology.

In Munich, Germany, the technology conglomerate Siemens AG is betting $1.1 billion on digital technologies, such as the proposition that blockchain data can be leveraged by machine learning to improve the secure transmission of data used in energy trading. Siemens is welcoming its employees and independent firms to bid for the money if they are willing to research how Siemens can develop businesses that use artificial intelligence. Siemens is just one of a number of companies embracing machine learning--the combination of artificial intelligence and deep analytics that enables enterprises to make predictions on large amounts of data and allows developers to experiment by incorporating features like speech and pattern recognition, as well as statistical techniques, into their analysis. And HPE's recent announcement of "machine learning as a service" (MLaaS) is aimed at helping the process really take off. Speaking at HPE Discover Las Vegas 2016, HPE Executive Vice President Robert Youngjohns called machine learning and deep analytics the most fundamental change we're ever going to see.

Email This Article NEW YORK (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence programs have beaten chess masters and TV quiz show champions. Two exchange operators have announced plans to launch artificial intelligence tools for market surveillance in the coming months and officials at a Wall Street regulator tell Reuters they are not far behind. Executives are hoping computers with humanoid wit can help mere mortals catch misbehavior more quickly. The software could, for instance, scrub chat-room messages to detect dubious bragging or back slapping around the time of a big trade. It could also more quickly unravel complex issues, like "layering," where orders are rapidly sent to exchanges and then canceled to artificially move a stock price.

The future isn't ready to arrive just yet. Apple has announced that its AirPods – the wireless earphones that the company were set to release this month – aren't "ready". The AirPods were first unveiled along with the iPhone 7 at an event last month. And the two were part of the same pitch – just as Apple had done with dropping the headphone jack, the AirPods were meant to signal that the company was ready for the wireless future. The AirPods built from the ground up for Apple's new vision of listening.

Artificial intelligence, and technology in general, will have a crucial role to play in society's progress, that is the view of the UK and American governments anyway. This Thursday President Obama announced at the first White House Frontier Conference that more than $300 million in funding, through partnerships, will be released for tech innovations that will improve healthcare, develop smart cities and enhance America's space ambition. "We may be in a slightly different period now, simply because of the pervasive applicability of AI and other technologies," said President Obama in a video shown at the start of the conference. President Obama believes AI, in particular, will be able to help solve the biggest crises that face the world, such as disease, famine, climate change and economic inequality. Others, like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, suggest AI's rise will be the biggest threat to the survival of the human race.

Should judges begin to feel fearful for their job security? According to a team of researchers, a new AI tool has been found to be highly accurate at predicting the outcome of European court cases. An AI judge that computes outcomes instead of a human jury has been the dystopian creation of science fiction writers for a number of years, but new developments suggest that they could be used in some capacity in future courts. According to University College London, a joint team of researchers from the US and the UK has developed a new AI method that is the first to predict the outcomes of a major international court, by automatically analysing case text using a machine-learning algorithm. The international court in this case is the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), and by churning the data obtained during these court cases from the cases brought by defendants and prosecutors, the AI was able to predict their outcomes 79pc of the time.

Tech pundit Tim O'Reilly had just tried the new Google Photos app, and he was amazed by the depth of its artificial intelligence. O'Reilly was standing a few feet from Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page this past May, at a small cocktail reception for the press at the annual Google I/O conference--the centerpiece of the company's year. Google had unveiled its personal photos app earlier in the day, and O'Reilly marveled that if he typed something like "gravestone" into the search box, the app could find a photo of his uncle's grave, taken so long ago. Google is open sourcing software that sits at the heart of its empire. The app uses an increasingly powerful form of artificial intelligence called deep learning. By analyzing thousands of photos of gravestones, this AI technology can learn to identify a gravestone it has never seen before.