From the Spinning Jenny, a mechanical weaver that increased worker's output and contributed to the industrial revolution, to the CMS tools replacing archive managers in the early 21st century, technology has replaced difficult and time-consuming labor. But these changes often provoke fear that the new technology will replace jobs. Generally speaking, this isn't the case: time and again, new technology has created new (and niche) side industries and jobs. The latest technology to strike fear is artificial intelligence. Some worry that artificial intelligence will bring about so much change so fast, that it will leave huge swathes of the workforce jobless.

A new app called FindFace, recently released in Russia, gives us a glimpse into what this future might look like. Made by two 20-something entrepreneurs, FindFace allows anybody to snap a photo of a passerby and discover their real name -- already with 70% reliability. The app allows people to upload photos and compare faces to user profiles from the popular social network Vkontakte, returning a result in a matter of seconds. According to an interview in the Guardian, the founders claim to already have 500,000 users and have processed over 3 million searches in the two months since they've launched.

A new self-driving'pod' capable of carrying eight passengers at one time around cities and airports will launch tomorrow. The Pod Zero, which has a range of 60 miles, has been designed transform the way people move around cities by offering transport over the last couple of miles of a journey. However, anyone in a hurry may need to brace themselves – the futuristic vehicles have a top speed of just 15mph. The'next generation' of autonomous vehicles are to be unveiled at an event in Birmingham. The Pod Zero (artist's impression) will carry up to eight passengers and can accommodate wheelchairs.

"In sum: Alexa is kinda my new best friend," writes Rebecca, an author and blogger on Mommyproof. As a mother of young children, it's not hard to see why: Rebecca details the joys of virtual assistant Amazon Echo, which functions as a kind of combined kitchen helper, child entertainer and DJ. "Is it weird that Alexa feels like my trusty little friend during that six pm witching hour, gently guiding me through dinnertime?" Rebecca's not alone: Other parent bloggers have touted the device's family-friendly uses when it comes to child care and household tasks. Many of these "mommy blog" posts are sponsored by Amazon in an ad campaign explicitly geared toward families with young children. In one recent television spot for the device, a young father excitedly purchases an Echo and watches as Alexa slowly becomes an integral part of the household.

Given the pace of how technology is changing and developing these days, what can only be considered as science fiction in the past could become a reality in the next decade. The artificial intelligence or AI is projected to balloon to a 70 billion industry by 2020, according to an IDC research, cited by the Bank of America as reported by Fortune. That is a significant milestone coming from the 8.2 billion industry value in 2013. AI is already being used in data analytics and web search systems, and driverless cars and service robots are also under development. With that, the future where AI will be changing people's everyday life doesn't seem that distant. Speaking to a crowd of tech leaders at a conference hosted last week by Recode, an online publication, Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that AI and machines have the potential to be so sophisticated that humans may need to be injected with "neural laces" that would link them to the computers so they could keep up with them.

What If robots decide to take over the world one day? Well… Alphabet Inc (the parent company of Google) has that same thought, that's why the company is developing a'kill switch', just in case, an artificial intelligence system turns evil. To put our minds at ease the tech giant has even published a paper which outlines Deep Mind's plans to ensure that'The Terminator' doesn't become a reality. DeepMind, a Google subsidiary tasked with creating advancements in artificial intelligent technology has already managed to make an AI system capable of beating the world's best Go players. An endeavour that was thought to be impossible by many including the world champion of Go, Lee Sedol.

A drunken man walking along a sidewalk at night trips and falls directly in front of a driverless car, which strikes him square on, killing him instantly. Had a human been at the wheel, the death would have been considered an accident because the pedestrian was clearly at fault and no reasonable person could have swerved in time. But the "reasonable person" legal standard for driver negligence disappeared back in the 2020s, when the proliferation of driverless cars reduced crash rates by 90 percent. Now the standard is that of the reasonable robot. The victim's family sues the vehicle manufacturer on that ground, claiming that, although the car didn't have time to brake, it could have swerved around the pedestrian, crossing the double yellow line and colliding with the empty driverless vehicle in the next lane.

This summer, the picturesque Birchcliffe Centre, a converted baptist church in the West Yorkshire village of Hebden Bridge, hosted an unusual festival. Guests danced across the sunlit floor to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach; they drank mugs of tea and watched talks. Outside, there was an "art walk" where attendees trudged up and down the muddy slopes, breathing in the scent of early summer flowers. There were nice places to eat, the village was welcoming. Everyone felt safe and included.

Do you fancy a technical talk to kick off this week? The AI Machine Learning community gets back at TechHub Bucharest for an interesting presentation. Join them on Monday, June 6, to find out more about the AlphaGo model and the machine learning algorithms it employs. During this meetup you'll get an in-depth presentation of the AlphaGo model and the machine learning algorithms it employs. AlphaGo is the artificial Go player developed by DeepMind, the first one to win against a professional human Go player.

In the past year alone, Google-owned Deep Mind has made great strides in artificial intelligence. The company has long kept an eye towards safety with the establishment of an ethics board as part of the 2014 acquisition, and now a new paper (via BI) from DeepMind and the University of Oxford describes the creation of a "big red button" method that can be used to stop AI from causing harm… In the paper, DeepMind assumes that AI agents are "unlikely to behave optimally all the time" when interacting with the real world. As such, it's important that human operators are able to halt the AI from continuing "a harmful sequence of actions" and lead it to a safer situation. The paper defines harm as either to the surrounding environment or the agent itself. The method created by the researches goes a step further by making sure the AI does not prevent itself from being interrupted by humans.