In the 1920s, the Soviet scientist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov used artificial insemination to breed a'humanzee' – a cross between a human and our closest relative species, the chimpanzee. Given the moral quandaries a humanzee might create, we can be thankful that Ivanov failed: when the winds of Soviet scientific preferences changed, he was arrested and exiled. But Ivanov's endeavour points to the persistent, post-Darwinian fear and fascination with the question of whether humans are a creature apart, above all other life, or whether we're just one more animal in a mad scientist's menagerie. Humans have searched and repeatedly failed to rescue ourselves from this disquieting commonality. Numerous dividers between humans and beasts have been proposed: thought and language, tools and rules, culture, imitation, empathy, morality, hate, even a grasp of'folk' physics. But they've all failed, in one way or another. I'd like to put forward a new contender – strangely, the very same tendency that elicits the most dread and excitement among political and economic commentators today.

When being empathetic is your full-time job, burning out is only human. Few people are more aware of this than customer service representatives, who are tasked with approaching each conversation with energy and compassion -- whether it's their first call of the day or their 60th. It's their job to make even the most difficult customer feel understood and respected while still providing them accurate information. But over the last few years, an unlikely aide has come forward: artificial intelligence tools designed to help people tap into and maintain "human" characteristics like empathy and compassion. One of these tools is a platform called Cogito, named for the famous Descartes philosophy Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am").

The ads you see online could soon get harder to refuse, thanks to a new artificial intelligence (AI) system that predicts whether you'll like an ad before it has even run. Designed by a technical team in Brisbane and delivered to marketers through headquarters in Austin, Texas, Junction AI technology has hit a nerve in an industry where new display ads often fall flat after advertisers pay handsomely to place them in key outlets. Copywriters lean heavily on ad-writing techniques like A/B testing, but these only go so far in predicting whether online citizens will respond to a particular ad. This leaves advertisers all but guessing whether they have chosen the right words and images to convince potential new customers to click through. That's a challenge for marketers that are increasingly equipping content marketing organisations (CMOs) to drive deeper engagement with customers and prospects in an ever more-crowded advertising market expected to surge from $US226.6b

GNW The global artificial intelligence (AI) in retail market attained $720.0 million in 2018 and is predicted to witness a CAGR of 35.4% during 2019–2024 (forecast period). The factors contributing to the growth of the market include the increasing investments in AI by retail companies and expanding e-retail industry. With AI, retailers have been able to automate their work processes, study consumer behavior, and capture relevant data through the adoption of numerous advanced technologies, such as machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and computer vision. When technology is considered, the AI in retail market is divided into computer vision, NLP, machine learning, and others (which include gesture recognition and analytics). Machine learning generated the highest revenue during the historical period (2014–2018) and is expected to dominate the market during the forecast period as well.

Australian singer Cody Simpson is currently making headlines globally for going public with his relationship with Miley Cyrus. And as the star becomes the talk of the town, Masked Singer Australia fans are now convinced he is the mystery Robot contestant. On Monday night's episode, a fresh batch of clues added to the growing pile of evidence that the iYiYi hit-maker is behind the elaborate costume. Cody Simpson (left) is The Masked Singer's Robot (right) according to a growing pile of evidence Cody has sung three times on the show so far, and remains in the competition against six celebrity rivals. With the clues mounting, fans believe the mystery singer is definitely Cody.

Scott Sanchez used to have a hard time deciding what to eat, especially when he was traveling. The 42-year-old wanted to lose weight and found he needed to dissect a menu with the waiter before he could order. It was a challenge, he says, but one that gave birth to The Fit, a menu personalization platform that uses artificial intelligence to give restaurant brands and their customers the option to customize their menu and food choices. At least 32 million Americans -- including 5 million children -- have food allergies, according to nonprofit Food Allergy Research & Education. Whenever they eat out, they need to make sure there are no ingredients in the food that could trigger an allergic reaction. Those with dietary preferences, from vegans to people wanting to lose weight -- there are 93 million obese people in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- also need to carefully examine menus.

Ever since Homo erectus, or upright man, a type of early human, carved a piece of stone into a tool, the welfare of our species has been on the increase. Indeed, this technological breakthrough led first to the hand ax, and eventually to the iPhone. We have found it convenient to organize the most dramatic periods of change between these inventions into four industrial revolutions. As each revolution unfolded, dire predictions of massive job losses ensued. Looking back at the first three, we can see how the concerns were misplaced. The number of jobs increased each time, as did living standards.

Robotic process automation, or RPA for short, is an emerging technology that allows you to automate business processes. It does this by mimicking the work of one or more users. I've seen this technology running on a thin-client machine, where the aim of the original business process was to create consulting codes. The diagram below, shows a simple example of how RPA can work. If you're used simpler tools, like Flow in Office 365 of IFTTT.com then you'll be familiar with this automation concept.

Australia's Indigenous population is rich in linguistic diversity, with over 300 languages spoken across different communities. Some of the languages can be as distinct as Japanese is to German. But many are at risk of becoming extinct because they are not widely accessible and have little presence in the digital space. Professor Janet Wiles is a researcher with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, known as CoEDL, which has been working to transcribe and preserve endangered languages. She says one of the biggest barriers to documenting languages is transcription. "How transcription is done at the moment is linguists select small parts of the audio that might be unique words, unique situations or interesting parts of grammar, and they listen to the audio and they transcribe it," she told SBS News.

On Valentine's Day, OpenAI gifted us a paper – Better Language Models and Their Implications – that rocked my educator's world. OpenAI had developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model that had learnt, in an unsupervised way using millions of webpages, how to undertake writing tasks, many of which were of reasonable quality according to objective benchmarks. Imagine a future where an AI responds to an assessment task by producing original writing at pass or credit levels. No two responses would be the same because the AI would learn to check against what it and other AI had already produced. Traditional written assessment relies on students producing original work.