AlphaGo has won the fifth of five games of Go against South Korean grandmaster Lee Se-dol. The final game was a close-run thing, spilling into overtime with the AI just half-a-point ahead at one stage. The best-of-five tournament, which saw the software win 4-1, is considered to be a significant moment in the development of artificial intelligence. Go is a sophisticated game with more potential moves than there are atoms in the observable universe, requiring a greater capacity for on-the-fly "thinking". In a post on Google's Asia-Pacific blog, top American go player Michael Redmond said: "It was difficult to say at what point AlphaGo was ahead or behind, a close game throughout. "AlphaGo made what looked like a mistake with move 48, similar to the mistake in Game Four in the middle of the board.

In an unassuming two-storey Victorian town house in Bristol, the occupants are being filmed, monitored, and tracked by invisible sensors as they go about their business, 24 hours a day. What they lose in privacy could be our gain in life expectancy, if the long-term data bears out. Pivotal to the 15-million Sensor Platform for Healthcare in a Residential Environment (SPHERE) project, the house has been invisibly fitted with dozens of cameras and sensors while its occupants are asked to don wearable devices. The aim is to reveal how health is related to everyday lifestyle and living conditions over time. The smart home observes how long the occupants slouch in front of the TV as opposed to sitting or walking or exercising.

Artificial intelligence (AI) may conjure up far-fetched ideas of robot assistants, or perhaps an all-seeing presence like HAL 9000, the sentient machine in the movie 2001. But the likelier truth is that AI will come in the form of software running in your data center. And it will be coming very soon: Research firm Gartner predicts that "smart machines" will have a widespread impact on business within the next four years. In general terms it's likely that AI will be able to help IT departments do their job - and help businesses be more productive – by ensuring that "processes get applied, stuff is accurate, errors are eliminated, and compliance is met," according to Dr Stuart Anderson, a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. It will also be quite unremarkable, according to some.

While traveling in Western Samoa many years ago, I met a young Harvard University graduate student researching ants. He invited me on a hike into the jungles to assist with his search for the tiny insect. He told me his goal was to discover a new species of ant, in hopes it might be named after him one day. Whenever I look up at the stars at night pondering the cosmos, I think of my ant collector friend, kneeling in the jungle with a magnifying glass, scouring the earth. I think of him, because I believe in aliens--and I've often wondered if aliens are doing the same to us.

This week, banker's fears were confirmed and the robot revolution has begun. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) will sack hundreds of face-to-face advisers and replace them with a robo-advisory online service, after the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) approved this technology. "Our customers increasingly want to bank with us using digital technology. As a result, we are scaling back our face-to-face advisers and significantly investing in an online investing platform that enables us to help a new group of customers with as little as 500 to invest," a RBS and NatWest spokesperson said in a statement according to the BBC. More and more banks are searching for digital options because they are cheaper and easier to use, and this attitude is advocated by the FCA.

Atom Bank is offering customer support via machine learning software on its mobile app. The bank, which gained its licence last year, delivers its products and services through an app for mobile devices and desktop computers. It is integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into its mobile app, which it said will provide near-human customer care. The machine learning technology from WDS – part of Xerox – will use analytics to capture the context of each customer inquiry and respond appropriately. It will also learn from experience.

Daniel Faggella is founder of TechEmergence, a news and advice website for entrepreneurs and investors interested in the intersection of technology and the mind. "Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next ten." These words, articulated by Neil Armstrong at a speech to a joint session of Congress in 1969, fit squarely into most every decade since the turn of the century, and it seems to safe to posit that the rate of change in technology has accelerated to an exponential degree in the last two decades, especially in the areas of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Artificial intelligence is making an extreme entrance into almost every facet of society in predicted and unforeseen ways, causing both excitement and trepidation.

When Google's algorithm AlphaGo beat South Korean Go Grandmaster Lee Se-dol by 4-1 last week, it was a significant event in the world of algorithms and artificial intelligence. This is because it represented a new form of artificial intelligence: intuitive artificial intelligence, something which is remarkably more challenging than standard artificial intelligence. The disruption happening thanks to algorithms is happening all around us. The largest taxi company in the world, Uber, owns no taxis, but uses smart algorithms to connect drivers and passengers. The largest telephone company in the world, WhatsApp, has no telecom infrastructure, but sends over 35 billion message per day.

Last week, Google's in house Artificial Intelligence department announced a breakthrough. Their software has learnt to play a game. Not just any game, but Go. It is thousands of years old, and considered by many to be the hardest board game in the world with more potential move combinations than you can shake a stick at and a requirement to see patterns and combinations and to play by'feel'. The complexity of the game is one thing, but the real point here is that Google's AI engine has learnt to play the game.

There is no meaningful sense in which there is an abstract notion of purpose. That is, purpose is something that comes from history. One of the things that might be true about computation, might be true about our world, that would be disappointing, is maybe we go through all this history and biology and civilization and so on, and at the end of the day, the answer is 42 or something. That's the end, so to speak. We got to the answer.