One of the advantages of running search workshops is that it forces me to keep up to date with changes and new developments. For many people, weird search results are something that they have to cope with but do not necessarily have time to investigate. They are providing information and support to other people, and once one project is over another takes its place. There is very little time to look into why the search engine - often Google - is behaving bizarrely. For me, keeping abreast of what the search engine companies are doing is a large chunk of my job and what I discover is sometimes disconcerting and worrying.

But the more articles I read on the topic, the more annoyed I get. It's taken me so long to figure out why! Conversations, writes WIRED, can do things traditional GUIs can't. Matt Hartman equates the surge in text-driven apps as a kind of "hidden homescreen". TechCrunch says "forget apps, now bots take over". The creator of Fin thinks it's a new paradigm all apps will move to. Dharmesh Shah wonders whether the rise of conversational UI will be the downfall of designers. Design, says Emmet Connolly at Intercom is a conversation. Benedict Evans prophecized that the new lay of the land is "all messaging expands until it includes software." "People don't want apps for every single business that you interact with," says David Marcus, head of Facebook Messenger, "…just have a message within a nicely designed bubble … [that's a] much nicer experience than an app." Under his charge, Facebook Messenger has tested this approach, building integrations with high profile partners as well as opening up a bot API. We've even seen avant-garde attempts at taking this idea to its extreme, like Quartz's latest app, which presents the news as a conversation, or the game Lifeline. Apps like Mailtime even promise to save us from our emails by turning them into chats. I guess I might be partially to blame for this, with a few pieces citing a section in a 2014 piece of mine that I literally titled "Chats as Universal UI."

A recent report predicts that a 100 million jobs could be at risk of being made redundant by automation. These are expected to include roles from supermarket cashier to accountant, as robotics and machine learning become increasingly able to perform routine tasks more efficiently than we can. But surely if there is one job title which will be safe from the inevitable rise of the machines it will be data scientist or big data analyst – after all haven't I been championing that career path as one with a bright future for some time now? And computers will always need a human to tell them what to do at some point, right? Sure a computer can learn, but won't it always need a human to teach it how - and tell it what - to learn?

The European Space Agency's plans to build a village on the moon are part of a much wider scheme to explore the far-flung regions of our solar system. Speaking at a recent conference, Esa boss Jan Woerner said: 'I think we should go first to the moon and then further on.' He added that Mars should not be our ultimate goal and said he is'quite sure humans will go further.' The European Space Agency's plans to build a village on the moon (concept pictured) are part of a much wider scheme to explore the far-flung regions of our solar system. Speaking at a recent conference, Esa boss Jan Woerner said: 'I think we should go first to the moon and then further on' Woerner said the project could allow exploration of the far side of the moon.

Swedish carmaker Volvo plans to run driverless car trials on public roads around London from next year. Initially the cars will be semi-autonomous, with real families travelling in them. Similar trials will run in the Swedish city Gothenburg. Drive Me London, as the trial is dubbed, will record data from these everyday journeys to help develop the technology and adapt it to real-world conditions. Details of which roads the cars will be tested on are not yet known.

First of all, tell me how many machines have helped you today? Most of you use your mobile devices and laptops every single day, cooking and cleaning is unimaginable without the so-called "modern appliances". Electronic gadgets monitor home security, air conditioning and all smart home devices. It's faster, safer and saves our energy. And now imagine that your toaster or microwave can think!

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

Cornell University wants to help whales avoid getting hit by ships, so it is working on an algorithm that uses audio recordings to alert ships to the whales' whereabouts. Dassault Systèmes is creating a 3D model of a human heart that will allow surgeons to test the performance of pacemakers before opening up patients. Sure, machine learning has already had a significant impact on the worlds of science and culture, and in life, but it will be years before CIOs need to start worrying about enterprise machine learning applications ... right? "If CIOs invested in machine learning three years ago, they would have wasted their money," Olley says. "But if they wait another three years, they will never catch up."

Swedbank has gone live with Nuance Nina, a virtual assistant that delivers a human-like, conversational customer service. The system, provided by US-based Nuance Communications, sits on the Swedbank website and the bank's customers can type their questions to the virtual assistant. Swedbank customer service agents are also using the system to source information for customers. Martin Kedbäck, channel management at Swedbank, says: "We like to be where our customers are, and that includes providing support online and in our other digital channels." Nuance says Nina has helped Swedbank improve customer experience, including a 78% "first-contact resolution within the first three months". Customer adoption has seen an average of 30,000 conversations per month within the same period; and it is currently answering eight out of every ten customer questions.

Artificial Intelligence has been the topic de jour lately with every corner of intellectual thought sounding in on the perils, and the potential rewards, of synthesizing a machine intelligence that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human can. Elon Musk, Bill Gates and even Stephen Hawking have all suggested that an AI with this sort of general intelligence (also known as Strong AI or Full AI) could bring about an apocalypse that sees an end to human civilization, or even an end to the human race. There's no doubt that Strong AI is the subject of intense research by DARPA, MIT, Berkeley, IBM, Google and many others. But it's hard not to notice that despite all the anxiety, Strong AI today lives only in the imagination of science fiction writers and in the hopes and dreams of research scientist. At the prestigious "Future of AI" conference in San Juan this January, the estimates for when an AI might emerge vacillated wildly from 5 years to a hundred years in our future--its variables are that unknown.