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Increasingly flexible, responsive, sensing, even humanlike, robots are beginning to augment and replace labour in a wide range of industries: a megatrend that is transforming the economics of manufacturing and reshaping the business landscape. Already used to fight wars, remove dangerous land mines, and fill customer orders, robots can also clean, dance, and play the violin; assist with surgery and rehabilitation, bathe elderly patients, measure and deliver medication, and offer companionship; and provide disaster relief, report the news, and drive cars. In short, robots can perform quite a few of the jobs that humans currently do – often more efficiently and at a far lower cost. Because robots can sharply improve productivity and offset regional differences in labour costs and availability, they'll likely have a major impact on the competitiveness of companies and countries alike. For instance, countries with a greater number of robotic programmers and robotic infrastructure could become more attractive to manufacturers than countries with cheap labour.

Smartron is headed by founder chairman Mahesh Lingareddy who is also the co-founder and CEO of Soft Machines Inc, a United Statesbased semiconductor company with operations in the US, India and Russia. It has research and development centres in Hyderabad and Bengaluru. Smartron is riding on the back of the IoT wave by innovating in the areas of smart, sensor, robotics, artificial intelligence, cloud and big data technologies to bring next generation smart devices, services and care, targeting consumer, enterprise, industrial and infrastructure markets. The company is funded by investors from the US, India and West Asia, among others.

David Nordfors is the co-chair and co-founder of the i4j Innovation for Jobs Summit together with Vint Cerf. There is a common misunderstanding about the coming automated economy that may destroy us all. Most people in business and finance (and most people, frankly) think that the new economy (of artificial intelligence and autonomous machines) is like the old economy: satisfying customers' needs for products and services. The real heart of the new economy will be about helping people need each other more. To build a new economy (and a decent, functional society), innovation must help us need each other more and in better ways… to bind us to each other.

For such a vital human capacity, consciousness is still a mystery to us. The question "What is consciousness?" has long been explored by philosophers but traditionally shunned by scientists, "because it was considered'spooky' or too vague or new-agey", according to author Andrew Smart. But that is starting to change, with neuroscientists and theorists in artificial intelligence joining the quest to locate what might be called the defining characteristic of humanity. Smart's new book Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics and Consciousness puts forward a tantalising hypothesis: that consciousness is a type of hallucination that may have evolved through the aeons as a survival mechanism. To answer the question "What is consciousness?" one must imagine how a computer could become human, he says.

The BMW 7 Series is the world's first production car that can operate with no driver aboard, if only to dazzle the neighbors when it eases into your home garage. Press a button on the remote, with its palm-size LCD readout, and watch the BMW drive itself into a garage or back its way out. With its camera and ultrasonic sensors, the BMW can fit into small or stuffed garages that are too tight to allow opening the car's doors. This roboparking feature is offered only in Europe for now, but BMW is pressing U.S. regulators for approval. The car can thrill when you're behind the wheel, as I discovered on a track test at Monticello Motor Club in New York's Catskills region.

Researchers at Oxford University are setting Google's artificial intelligence DeepMind loose on analyzing Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering playing cards. According to Kotaku, the AI analyzes card data such as resource cost and damage, and turns it into code that a machine can read. Here's the abstract from the paper titled'Latent Predictor Networks for Code Generation': "Many language generation tasks require the production of text conditioned on both structured and unstructured inputs. We present a novel neural network architecture which generates an output sequence conditioned on an arbitrary number of input functions. Crucially, our approach allows both the choice of conditioning context and the granularity of generation, for example characters or tokens, to be marginalised, thus permitting scalable and effective training. "Using this framework, we address the problem of generating programming code from a mixed natural language and structured specification.

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

The ancient ruins of Palmyra, one of Syria's oldest cities, have stood for 3,000 years, but, since last May, the Unesco World Heritage site has been facing some of the most brutal threats to its existence. Located in an oasis northeast of the Syrian capital of Damascus, Palmyra has become a significant symbolic and military position in the now 5-year-old Syrian conflict. After seizing the city of roughly 50,000 residents last May, the Islamic State group was forced out of Palmyra over the weekend by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad. On a strategic level, retaking Palmyra gives the Syrian regime a strong military base for future operations against the militants' other strongholds as well as renewed control over some of Syria's most important oil and gas fields. But regaining Palmyra is also a highly symbolic win for the Syrian regime -- now trying to salvage whatever is left of the ancient ruins -- in its quest to position itself as a key partner in the fight against the terrorist group, also known as ISIS. An aerial view of the historic city of Palmyra, in Homs Goveronorate, Syria, is seen in this still image taken from a drone video, March 28, 2016.

As the Primary season has progressed, there's been no end of political pundits backpedaling and mea-culpa-ing over their previous inability to predict the rise of Donald Trump to become the frontrunner in the GOP. From Charles Krauthammer admitting that it was wrong to laugh at The Donald to innumerable others, both liberal and conservative, wishing they'd take Trump seriously, it seems like just about everyone in the Predictive Class will be dining on roast crow this Easter. But why did they get things so wrong? Was it because they assumed that he'd "crash and burn" like John Podhoretz? Was it because they assumed that he couldn't win because Republican voters hated him, as implied by Patrick Murray of Monmouth University when releasing early poll results in June of 2015?