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.

Today on In Case You Missed It: Kobi is a yard work robot that is purportedly able to clean leaves, mow the lawn and shovel snow, though the promo video shows it very briefly moving snow only, so stand by for reviews on that rush purchase. Meanwhile UCSF researchers found that infant brains actually move neurons around up to three months after birth, which is not something we'd known before. The self-driving car experiment out of the University of Oxford wrapped up with a sweet little send-off video. If you're interested in the LED suit from Red Bull, that video is here. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.

Russian officials have unveiled a'microwave gun' that can disable an unmanned drone and even a missile from up to 0.6 miles (1km) away. The first sample of the weapons have been revealed following a secretive Russian Defense Ministry exhibition. The'death ray' will be used to target enemy drones and apparently deactivates the radios of UAVs and warheads, causing them to lose control. Russian officials have unveiled a'microwave gun' that can disable an unmanned drone and even a missile from up to 0.6 miles (1km) away. A Krasukha, a Russian electronic warfare system, is pictured.

DeepMind, an artificial intelligence firm that was acquired by Google in 2014 and is now under the Alphabet umbrella, has developed a computer than can refer to its own memory to learn facts and use that knowledge to answer questions. That's huge, because it means that future AI could respond to queries from humans without being taught every possible correct answer. DeepMind says its new AI model, called a differentiable neural computer (DNC), can be fed with things like a family tree and a map of the London Underground network, and can answer complex questions about the relationships between items in those data structures. For example, you could get responses to questions like, "Starting at Bond street, and taking the Central line in a direction one stop, the Circle line in a direction for four stops, and the Jubilee line in a direction for two stops, at what stop do you wind up?" DeepMind says its DNC could also help you plan an efficient route from Moorgate to Piccadilly Circus. Similarly, it could understand and answer questions about the relationships between people from a large family, like, ""Who is Freya's maternal great uncle?" This discovery builds on the concept of neural networks, which mimic the way the human mind works.

Research suggests Australians are ready to embrace fintech banking solutions, and the launch of three new London-based chatbot startups may be a sign the rest of the world is gearing up for a revolution too. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been rapidly progressing over the past two decades, with machines reaching and exceeding human performance on an increasing number of tasks. Just this week, the White House released a report entitled Preparing for the future of Artificial Intelligence, which describes the ways in which AI has and continues to yield new opportunities for progress in critical areas such as health, education, energy, and the environment. Another important area of business, ripe for disruption, is finance and banking. In Australia, almost half (47%) the population expect to use financial technology (fintech) services for 50% or more of their financial needs in five years' time.

Artificial intelligence has risen to prominence this year. In March 2016, Google DeepMind's AlphaGo won 4-1 in the Chinese game of Go, beating the top Go player in the world over the past decade, Lee Sedol. And IBM's Watson correctly diagnosed a Japanese leukaemia patient in ten minutes after doctors had failed to diagnose her condition over several months. Navigating this information requires vastly more sophisticated tools than hitherto available. Large industry players are aware of this and Google, IBM and Microsoft are all investing heavily.

A UK parliamentary committee has appealed the UK government to take action and begin seriously considering "a host of social, ethical and legal questions" that are increasingly pertinent thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence. The science and technology committee started its inquiry in March 2016, visiting Google's DeepMind office, gathering 67 written statements, and interviewing 12 witnesses in person in order to establish the most urgent issues. In its newly published report, the committee has concluded that "while it is too soon to set down sector-wide regulations for this nascent field, it is vital that careful scrutiny of the ethical, legal and societal dimensions of artificially intelligent systems begins now." The biggest reason for this is the need to ensure that the UK is building socially beneficial AI systems, and one of the best ways to make this happen is to start a wider public dialogue on the issue. There are three main issues that the committee flags up as requiring "serious" consideration: minimizing bias being accidentally built into AI systems; ensuring that the decisions they make are transparent; and establishing ways to verify that AI systems are operating as intended and won't behave unpredictably. In these early stages, the committee advises in its report that the government creates a standing Commission on Artificial Intelligence with a broad membership that is able to provide a wide range of expertise.

Driverless cars would hit a child on the street if it meant saving the people inside the vehicle, Mercedes-Benz Australia says. The luxury car brand's Australian branch has answered the moral dilemma of who a driverless car would save if it was faced with running over a child or swerving into a car and potentially killing the passengers. 'If there is someone literally jumping in front of you, in that circumstance, there's nothing technology can do except reduce speed of impact,' Mercedes-Benz Australia spokesman David McCarthy told The Australian. 'If an impact is inevitable, it will reduce the speed, tighten seatbelts and prime the brakes. 'The safety systems and impact protections are obviously greater within the cabin than outside. 'I would say that the vehicle is designed inside to protect the people inside, and it's the assistance systems that do that,' he said.

Hedge fund managers beware, someone is watching you. Or rather, something is watching you. A new artificial intelligence system can monitor traders, learn their behaviour patterns and raise the alarm when they do something out of character. For example, a trader who has avoided securities for a long time after suffering a loss on them suddenly dives back into a losing position. This triggers an alarm in the monitoring system and sends an alert to the hedge fund's compliance team.

In the aftermath of the Brexit vote to leave, one of the Tweets that caught my eye was from founder and CEO of analyst firm HfS Research Phil Fersht, which simply said, "At least the British can stop worrying about robots taking their jobs. Just get rid of the jobs altogether…" While that may not be amusing as it plays out against our globalized economy, it demonstrates how this topic has taken hold of so many of us. About a year ago, I was asked to sit on a panel at the annual Constellation Research Connected Enterprise 2015 called "The Robots Are Here! The Future of HR Tech," to debate whether we're entering a dystopian existence where humans are the bottleneck to productivity and innovation or becoming a world of augmented humanity and digital humanization. It's a fact that major economic shifts have led to both marginalization, the downside, as well as great opportunity, clearly the upside.