Artificial intelligence has had a bad rap (see: Terminator), and public confidence has waned. Would you trust a machine to diagnose you? Medical professionals today faced off against health firm Babylon's'Check a Symptom' app feature, in a bid to find out who's best equipped to triage patients: man or machine? The challenge saw Professor Irwin Nazareth, former head of primary care at UCLH, examining patients with the help of either: (1) one of Britain's most senior A&E nurses, (2) an Oxford-educated Junior Doctor, or (3) Babylon's'Check' feature. It turns out that that the app came to "the same accurate assessment" as both the nurse and junior doctor, but faster, and at no cost.

Teenagers may lose their virginity to sex robots in the future, a leading expert predicted yesterday. Professor Noel Sharkey, emeritus professor of robotics at Sheffield University, warned that android sex dolls may have damaging consequences for society. He said that just as the rise of internet porn took the Government by surprise, a similarly seismic robot revolution is on the way – with far-reaching consequences. Professor Sharkey, speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, explained that he was'fairly liberal about sex'. But he explained: 'It's not a problem having sex with a machine.

You see them at LAX airport in the second week of June every year, long snaking lines of them, sloping off long haul flights and waiting to pass through customs. They're mostly men, mostly in their 20s and 30s, dressed in jeans, T-shirts and trainers; they're in big groups, laughing and joking, enjoying the air of jubilant anticipation, but pretending not to. They're all here for the same thing; the same thing 50,000 other people are coming to Los Angeles for; the same thing I've now been doing for 10 years. E3 – the electronic entertainment expo – is effectively the Mecca of the mainstream video game industry. Held every year at the vast Los Angeles convention centre (except for a couple of ill-remembered jaunts to Atlanta, and two years when it was semi-cancelled), it is a trade-only event that everyone in the business has to attend at least once.

I sent this announcement to 46,383 Digital Health LinkedIn group members. If you're on LinkedIn, please do join the group, which allows you to opt in to receiving these announcements in addition to connecting with thousands of other global stakeholders in digital health. Note that I will continue to update this announcement up until sending out the final version via LinkedIn. Crowdfunding for digital health wearable tech continues to be scorching hot: London-based startup Vinaya's emotion-tracking bracelet recently nabbed 100,000 in just 24 hours on Indiegogo and the Pebble 2 smartwatch has landed over 10 million so far on Kickstarter. A cool new partnership called'Surfline Scout' was announced by Surfline (a resource for surfers that I use regularly and provides surf/wave conditions and forecasting) and Trace, a device you attach to your surfboard to "Relive those epic sessions with GPS maps, wave count, top speed, calories burned, biggest turn, and much more" (I don't have one).

When I first spotted Shift Technology with their focus on fraud detection for insurance, I assumed I would find a venture in Israel (which is known for smarts in finding the bad guys in cyberspace, as we outlined when we went to Israel on our Fintech global tour). So I was surprised to find that Shift Technology is a Paris based venture. There is a lot more tech innovation in France than the image of economic sclerosis would lead you to assume. The next thing that jumps out at you is that they recently closed a 10m Series A round in a tough market from a top tier VC (Accel Partners). So they must be doing something right.

Teenagers may lose their virginity to sex robots in the future, a leading expert predicted yesterday. Professor Noel Sharkey, emeritus professor of robotics at Sheffield University, warned that android sex dolls may have damaging consequences for society. He said that just as the rise of internet porn took the Government by surprise, a similarly seismic robot revolution is on the way – with far-reaching consequences. Professor Sharkey, speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, explained that he was'fairly liberal about sex'. But he explained: 'It's not a problem having sex with a machine.

La Poste has bought the Grenoble-based technology company ProbaYes, as part of its drive to step up its digital activity with Artificial Intellligence (AI). In a statement issued last week, La Poste said that the acquisition was an opportunity to "expand and include an Artificial Intelligence research centre to meet the needs created by internal transformation and optimisation but also the needs to personalise and develop new services for customers". ProbaYes will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of MediaPost Holding. The company statement added: "La Poste is continuing to ramp up its transformation through a range of digital services centered around its role as a universal operator for exchanges and notably in the field of the Internet of Things, and aims to use its trusted position to bring people together and make daily life simpler for individuals, professionals and businesses."

Tracking customers in real-time, zero-click ordering and delivering pizzas via artificially intelligent robots are just some of the latest innovations underway at Domino's. The pizza retailer today launched the first in a proposed series of tech innovation events, under the brand'Abacus', showcasing the way digital and technology is being harnessed by the business. Ten innovations were detailed, some of which will be available from next week, while others will be rolled out over the coming 12-24 months.All stemmed from the theme'time is the enemy of food' and showed the power of harnessing data analytics not only for operational process improvements, but also for tailoring customer experiences and interaction. The first of these is On-Time Cooking, an extension of the GPS Driver Tracker capabilities Domino's has been providing for the last 10 years aimed at shortening the time between cooking a pizza and when customers pick up their order. Domino's A/NZ managing director, Don Meij, said that until now, stores haven't known exactly when a customer will arrive, running the risk of pizzas sitting on the rack for 10 or 20 minutes longer than they should.

Cyber attacks continue to increase in volume, velocity, and variety. Cyber criminals display great sophistication and can purchase a revolving multitude of digital weapons inexpensively via the dark web. They operate in an environment in which they know that borders are meaningless and the chances of apprehension and punishment are slim. Inventor Ray Kurzweil made his name as a pioneer in technology that helped machines understand human language, both written and spoken. These days he is probably best known as a prophet of The Singularity, one of the leading voices predicting that artificial intelligence will soon surpass its human creators - resulting in either our enslavement or immortality, depending on how things shake out.

Last week, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and other cutting-edge companies, took a surprising question at the Code Conference, a technology event in California. What, a man in the audience asked, did Musk make of the idea that we are living not in the real world, but in an elaborate computer simulation? Musk exhibited a surprising familiarity with this concept. "I've had so many simulation discussions it's crazy," Musk said. Citing the speed with which video games are improving, he suggested that the development of simulations "indistinguishable from reality" was inevitable.