A couple of years ago, Andy Rubin--the celebrated creator of Android and until recently the head of Google's mobile Internet efforts--helped his wife, Rie, build a bakery in a decommissioned train station in Los Altos, California. They called it Voyageur du Temps, French for time traveler. As the name suggests, the bakery conveys visitors to an earlier era--by painstakingly re-creating the flavors and textures of classic European pastry. To pull this off, the Rubins went so far as to hire chefs from Japan, where traditional baking techniques are rigorously studied, and to purchase a rare Bongard Cervap oven, one of only two on the West Coast. The project was typical Rubin, in that it involved throwing an almost comical amount of money, energy, and engineering talent at a hobby, just for the fun of it. But it was also atypical Rubin, in that he usually marshals such resources to build artifacts from the future--like the robotic arm and the retinal scanner he's installed in his house. Even at his backward- looking bakery, Rubin couldn't resist adding some forward-leaning touches. He began writing software for a "closed cash" device that could receive payment, dole out change, and log transactions without a cashier's intervention. And he built a private meeting room in the back, complete with a homemade magnetized lock system.

Automation and industrial robots have been in the manufacturing and related industries for decades, with the usage prevalent in shop floors and assembly lines. In 2008, a firm called Kiva Systems invented suitcase-like machines that would park underneath racks and move them around in the warehouse. Raffaello D' Andrea, the co-founder of Kiva, said: "You don't have to walk over to the shelves to get things -- the shelves come to you." Amazon acquired Kiva Systems four years later to obtain the technology to sort, organise and transport Amazon's massive inventory. Without a doubt, technology has reduced the need for human labour, especially in manual and routine tasks. It has largely done its job -- simplifying tasks and minimising errors -- although at the expense of eliminating low-skilled factory workers.

To maintain and build a Hi-tech military advantage, the Pentagon is turning to the country's software and technology hub, Silicon Valley and its hottest and latest technology Artificial Intelligence, popularly known as AI. Today, Ash Carter, Secretary of Defense made his fourth trip to the area since his appointment on the post in last year. He had been the frequent traveler of the region in the past as well, he said in his speech given at the Defense Department Research Facility near Google's headquarters. US, currently, is concerned with the re-emergence of China and Russia in the military powers and therefore is looking a unique and a better tool to make the military of the country strong and rigid. This plan was articulated as "Third offset" strategy by Carter at last fall.

An artificial intelligence platform that has previously predicted the winners of the Oscars and the Super Bowl has now won the "holy grail" of gambling: the Kentucky Derby Superfecta. The human-based artificial intelligence--called UNU--predicted the first, second, third and fourth horses in the Derby at 540-1 odds, earning the technology's inventor Louis Rosenberg 10,842 from a 20 dollar bet. "When I saw the horses cross the line, I knew I was witnessing a milestone in the predictive abilities of AI, as well as a harbinger to future changes in how the world views sports gambling," Rosenberg tells Newsweek. UNU uses a unique form of artificial intelligence called swarm intelligence that aims to amplify rather than replace human intelligence. It works like this: a group of people login to an UNU online forum through their smartphones or computers.

A SpaceX capsule returned to Earth on Wednesday with precious science samples from NASA's one-year space station resident. SpaceX reported a good splashdown, with three red-and-white striped parachutes slowing the final descent. The Dragon had been at the station for a month, dropping off supplies as well as an experimental, inflatable room that will pop open in two weeks. It was set free by the station's big robot arm. "Dragon spacecraft has served us well, and it's good to see it departing full of science," Peake radioed from 250 miles up.

At the end of last month, Sundar Pichai wrote his first annual shareholder letter as CEO of Google. Eight months prior, Larry Page and Sergey Brin led a restructure of the company they founded, separating its core internet business from subsidiaries focusing on new areas of innovation, such as self-driving cars, drones, augmented reality, biotech and life sciences. Page and Brin now lead umbrella company Alphabet as CEO and president respectively, while Pichai heads up Google. It was the first time the annual shareholder letter had been written by anyone other than Page and Brin. Pichai kept it simple, outlining the key areas Google will focus on across its product lines – but he was bold enough to say they will all be driven by a long-term investment in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

AUTONOMOUS cars are just around the corner. Cities across the world are rolling out pilots of driverless vehicles, and soon motorists in Germany will be able to relax on the autobahn as their cars drive them from Munich to Berlin (see "London is set for driverless car roll-out – so what comes next?"). In other words, we are on the brink of a transport revolution as potentially radical as the one that began in 1908 with the Model T Ford. By 1931 the automobile's transformative power was so clear that Aldous Huxley imagined the people of his Brave New World worshipping Henry Ford as the creator of their dystopian society. Huxley was on to something. The Ford revolution changed Western society.

BigML Spring 2016 release is here! GMT 02:00) for a FREE live webinar to learn about the latest and greatest version of BigML. We'll be focusing exclusively on WhizzML, a new domain-specific language that lets you automate Machine Learning workflows, implement high-level Machine Learning algorithms, and share them with others. WhizzML stands to make a big difference not only in how developers conceive of and implement smart applications, but also how analysts and scientists reduce the burden of repetitive analyses.

Eric Poindessault is founder and CEO at Biggerpan. From HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey to Samantha in Spike Jonze's Her, for decades we have been obsessed with the idea that artificial intelligence powered-computers will one day be able to interact with people, follow spoken instructions and make decisions independently, like a human would. Since Siri hit our screens on the iPhone 4, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Baidu have entered the playing field, too. But while each new generation brings its lot of interesting new features or use cases, they are still far off from the AI representations in movies. It's hard to imagine anyone engaging in a romantic relationship with Siri, or NASA putting Alexa in control of a spacecraft just yet. Movies have set the bar pretty high, and we are still waiting for such ubiquitous voice-controlled AI assistants to enter the real world.

About Author The second phase of Delhi's odd-even rule ended Saturday, but restrictions on "surge pricing" used by cab aggregators Ola and Uber to meet demand and supply is not expected to end till the state government issues sector-specific guidelines. Maitreya One, a black futurist and hip-hop artist living in Harlem, steps off the Greyhound bus on a warm morning in Montgomery, Alabama. I walk up to him and give him a hug. Nightmare scenarios involving Artificial Intelligence typically involve computers that become too smart for their own good and turn against their creators. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 famously refused to open the pod bay doors for Dave: Well, now we have an entirely different cause to be wary of AI, and the culprit is human rather than machine.