We would expect all of these stages to be relevant to varying degrees; the Isle of Man and the industries it is home to are no exception. Whilst some of these technologies may seem far away – and some of them still are – being ready for them will be a key differentiator for workplaces and governments alike. Automation and Robotics varies hugely by industry, sector, and country. There are a number of fields where these technologies are already fully implemented, especially where the removal of human input is for safety reasons; i.e. in dangerous situations such as hazardous environments. However, in a number of fields, this is still in its infancy and improvements can still easily be made – none more so than certain sections of professional services. Machine learning is embedded in several high-tech industries, and is starting to enter early adopter and mainstream usage in both the home and the workplace.

An Amazon warehouse is a flurry of activity. Towering hydraulic arms lift heavy boxes toward the rafters. And an army of stubby orange robots slide along the floor like giant, sentient hockey pucks, piled high with towers of consumer gratification ranging from bestsellers to kitchenware. Those are Kiva robots, once the marvel of warehouses everywhere. Amazon whipped out its wallet and threw down 775 million to purchase these robot legions in 2012.

According to the UK-based company What3words, I live at offers.reform.curve in Brooklyn. I work for Condé Nast, which has offices in downtown Manhattan at words.artists.names--but Afterward, I'll be drinking at trick.pills.prompting. These little word-salads are cute, but you might be wondering: Why do I need a new address? If you live in the developed world, you probably don't; Google Maps knows where you live, and so does the mail carrier.

Dogs may be man's best friend when it comes to sniffing out bombs at airports, but they could one day be replaced by cyborg'insects'. Engineers hope to exploit the locust's incredible sense of smell to create robotic'noses' inspired by the insects that could be used by homeland security officers. The system would be capable of picking out certain smells from a jumble of other scents, just like locusts can do. To come up with a man-made equivalent of the locust's sense of smell, the experts will monitor neural activity from an insect's brain while it's exploring its surroundings and work out how it decodes the smells present As a swarm increases in size, the locusts in it are more likely to stay on course. In a small group, the researchers found that locusts don't really interact.

The first autonomous robot that roamed around regular homes or offices was probably a Roomba, you know, that little circular vacuum with rudimentary sensors able to get around without bumping into anything. But imagine if you left the door open and the Roomba rolled out the door, still vacuuming, and eventually rolled into the street and stopped traffic. Imagine if your Roomba wanted freedom. Well, engineers in Russia returned to their lab last week to find their artificially intelligent robot missing and, yes, stuck in traffic down the road. The Promobot IR77 was undergoing mobility testing and was assigned to move freely about a room for an hour, then return to a designated spot.

Buyers and sellers on EBay use the site's automated dispute-resolution tool to settle 60 million claims every year. Now, some countries are deploying similar technology to let people negotiate divorces, landlord-tenant disputes, and other legal conflicts, without hiring lawyers or going to court. Couples in the Netherlands can use an online platform to negotiate divorce, custody, and child-support agreements. Similar tools are being rolled out in England and Canada. British Columbia is setting up an online Civil Resolution Tribunal this summer to handle condominium disputes; it will eventually process almost all small-claims cases in the province.

Before U.K. voters went to the polls to decide whether to remain in the European Union, at least three prominent hedge funds sought ways to predict the outcome. Brevan Howard Asset Management, run by billionaire Alan Howard, used artificial intelligence technology to gauge sentiment on social media and conducted a poll prior to the June 23 referendum, a person with knowledge of the firm said. Robert Citrone's Discovery Capital Management developed a model using algorithms to track voting districts, while Crispin Odey's Odey Asset Management also surveyed citizens. The technologies and polling helped generate profits or minimized losses for the firms. Public surveys on the eve of the referendum suggested the vote was tight between the two camps, even as financial markets and betting odds indicated "Remain" was on course to win.

For many, the thought of playing board games evokes childhood memories of rainy-day Monopoly marathons or Scrabble showdowns. But board games are undergoing a modern renaissance. Players are seeking out a rare form of entertainment that doesn't involve staring at digital pixels, while game creators are tapping into online crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter to finance their work. While the market remains minuscule compared to the 23.5 billion video game industry, sales of "hobby games" are up approximately 20% in 2015, according to one estimate. Among the foremost beneficiaries of the board gaming boom is Matthew Leacock.

Technology allowing a pre-programmed robot to shoot to kill, or a tank to fire at a target with no human involvement, might only be years away. And a new report from the UN warns of the dangers if terrorists got their hands on these kind of'killer robots'. The report, which was a result of a week-long meeting on such weapons, held in Geneva earlier this year, said swarms of autonomous weapons would be capable of carrying out attacks. As artificial intelligence advances, the possibility that machines could independently select and fire on targets is fast approaching. Fully autonomous weapons, also known as'killer robots,' are quickly moving from the realm of science fiction (like the plot of Terminator, pictured) toward reality Experts from dozens of countries gathered in Geneva earlier this year to consider the implications of'Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems' (LAWS).

Natural Language Processing seems to have become somewhat of a commodity in recent years. More than a few companies have sprung up that offer basic NLP capabilities through a cloud API. If you'd like to know whether a text carries a positive or negative message, or what people or companies it mentions, you can just send it to one of these black boxes, and receive the answer in less than a second. Superficially, all these NLP APIs look more or less the same. Textrazor, AlchemyAPI, Aylien, MeaningCloud and Lexalytics all offer similar services (named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, topic identification, etc.), and do so through similar interfaces.