I first met Pepper in 2014, a human-shaped robot at a mobile store of Akihabara district in Tokyo. Although our conversation quickly reached some limits by the fact that he (it?) could only speak Japanese at the time, I sympathized with what his creator Aldebaran (a French company now part of the Softbank Japanese conglomerate) defines as a genuine day-to-day companion, whose number one quality is his ability to perceive emotions and adjust his behavior to your mood based on your voice, face expression and words you use. To-date, 10,000 Pepper robots have been sold mostly to Japanese homes. One third of them are used as an attraction to surprise customers and inform them. Nestlé is planning on equipping more than 1,000 Nescafé sales outlets in Japan.

The evidence of our displacement by machines is sketchy, and we should be able to adjust to the new technological era if we put our minds to it. OPINION: It is now widely accepted that technological advances, especially ones that make machines more like humans - such as robotisation or artificial intelligence - are putting people out of work and will only destroy more jobs in the future. The wealth will accrue to those who own the machines, not to what's known as the middle class today. There's some good news for humans, though: The evidence of our displacement by machines is sketchy, and we should be able to adjust to the new technological era if we put our minds to it. Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology labelled this "the great decoupling": according to them, advances in productivity, mainly driven by the development of digital technology, and the resulting economic growth, no longer cause employment and workers' incomes to rise.

The rap on eBay's website is that it's too messy, forcing users to pick through page after page of listings to find what they really want. Plenty of customers just give up and head to Amazon instead. The good news is that eBay knows this is a problem and is working to fix it. The bad news is that eBay on average hosts 900 million listings -- from new ink cartridges to one-of-a-kind porcelain dolls -- making sorting all this stuff a humongous job. As part of its push to offer up more relevant products to shoppers, eBay on Thursday said it agreed to purchase Sweden-based Expertmaker, a 10-year-old software firm specializing in artificial intelligence and machine learning to help organize and analyze huge sets of data.

When it was revealed that Google's London-based company DeepMind would be able to access the NHS records of 1.6 million patients who use three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS trust – Barnet, Chase Farm and the Royal Free – it rang alarm bells. Not just because Google, a sprawling octopus of a company with tentacles in all our lives, wishes to "organise the world's information". Not just because patients are unlikely to have consented to Google having this information. The issue for many is the intertwining of these concerns with the idea of artificial intelligence (AI). DeepMind is no ordinary company.

Google has been granted access to approximately 1.6 million NHS patient records so that its artificial intelligence company can develop an app-based healthcare warning system. According to New Scientist magazine, the data sharing agreement gives Google's artificial intelligence company DeepMind access to patient data at the Royal Free, Barnet and Chase Farm hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS Trust. The deal, which makes five years' worth of data available, will be used by DeepMind to build an app-based early warning system for patients at risk of acute kidney injuries. However, Google has not ruled out using the information for other purposes if it involved improving healthcare. The shared data includes full names and patient histories, as well as sensitive information on HIV testing, details of abortions, drug overdoses and real-time NHS data on admissions, discharges and patient transfers.

Today, telepresence robots are priced for purchase or rent anywhere between 5,000 to 200,000, Chun says. While his research suggests the telepresence market is valued at 4 billion, he estimates that it's actually about half when factoring in conservative assumptions. Still, there is a lot of promise in the near future. Chun recorded 20 telepresence robot patents in 2014, and projected 36 patents for 2015. Additionally, the United States remains the dominant market, but Chun is seeing expansion in countries in Asia and the Middle East.

It is now widely accepted that technological advances, especially ones that make machines more like humans -- such as robotization or artificial intelligence -- are putting people out of work and will only destroy more jobs in the future. The wealth will accrue to those who own the machines, not to what's known as the middle class today. There's some good news for humans, though: The evidence of our displacement by machines is sketchy, and we should be able to adjust to the new technological era if we put our minds to it. Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology labeled this "the great decoupling": according to them, advances in productivity, mainly driven by the development of digital technology, and the resulting economic growth, no longer cause employment and workers' incomes to rise. "The Second Machine Age is playing out differently than the First Machine Age, continuing the long-term trend of material abundance but not of ever-greater labor demand," McAfee told Harvard Business Review.

When you look at cloud skills, it's more important to think about what's coming rather than what's already here. Why? Thousands of IT people will complete cloud certification programs this year. If you delay, the job market may be flooded by the time you're ready. Soon the "Internet of Things" will be keeping watch on jet engines, refrigerators and freezers, factory floors and more, thanks to a series of partnerships announced by Microsoft at the Hannover Messe industrial fair in Germany. Some people spend weeks, months, even years trying to learn machine learning without any success.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Robots play football in a demonstration of artificial intelligence at the stand of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence at the CeBIT Technology Fair on March 2, 2010 in Hannover, Germany. Artificial Intelligence or AI is one of the favorite topics today. AI has the potential of changing the future and making life more convenient. However, some remain reserved because of the potential threats AI may bring to humanity. Learn what Slate readers think about AI here.