KIM LANDERS: From self-driving cars to facial recognition new technology powered by artificial intelligence is changing the way we live and work and how we make decisions. But what is this rapid rise of new technology doing to our Human Rights? That's the question a new project from the Human Rights Commission is going to tackle. It's trying to identify the issues at stake before coming up with a final report by late next year. Edward Santow is the Human Rights Commissioner.

Germany Market Analysis Table 35: German Recent Past, Current & Future Analysis for Artificial Intelligence Analyzed with Annual Revenue Figures in US$ Million for Years 2015 through 2024 (includes corresponding Graph/Chart) 9.4.3 Italy Market Analysis Table 36: Italian Recent Past, Current & Future Analysis for Artificial Intelligence Analyzed with Annual Revenue Figures in US$ Million for Years 2015 through 2024 (includes corresponding Graph/Chart) 9.4.4

Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk – about half my annual professor's salary – all to deliver some insight on the subject of "the future of technology". I've never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I'm asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, Crispr. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them.

YOU may think you are pretty hard to read, but artificial intelligence can predict your personality just from subtle, unconscious eye movements. Psychologists have suspected that personality influences how we visually take in the world. Curious people tend to look around more and open-minded people gaze longer at abstract images, for example. Now, Tobias Loetscher at the University of South Australia and his colleagues have used machine learning to study the relationship between eye movements and personality more closely.

It's often the case that the more useful a robot is, the less exciting it is. The robots that do the hardest jobs tend to be straightforward solutions to straightforward problems, because that's what works. The (self-declared) world's largest robot is an efficient, grubby example of this--it's an autonomous train that recently hauled 28,000 metric tons of iron ore 280 kilometers across the Australian desert. Australia is a big place, and it takes a lot of effort to get material out of the middle of Australia (where it's not useful) to the coast (where it can be taken somewhere that it is). Trains are the most efficient way of doing this, and they travel back and forth through a whole lot of nothing, taking ore from mine to port and bringing the empty cars back again.

A demonstration video that veteran University College, London neuroscientist John O'Keefe often presents in lectures shows a rat moving around the inside of a box. Every time the rat heads for the top-left corner, loud pops play through a speaker; those sounds are the result of the firing of a specific neuron attached to an electrode. The neuron only fires when the rat moves to the same small area of the box. This connection of certain neurons to locations led O'Keefe and student Jonathon Dostrovsky to name those neurons "place cells" when they encountered the phenomenon in the early 1970s. Today, researchers such as Huajin Tang, director of the Neuromorphic Computing Research Center at Sichuan University, China, are using maps of computer memory to demonstrate how simulated neurons fire in much the same way inside one of their wheeled robots.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Amazon is making it easier for those with hearing and speech impairments to utilize Alexa. Starting today, the Echo Show will have an option to toggle on a new feature called "Tap to Alexa," which will let users tap the device's screen to access the digital assistant. The feature includes shortcuts to common Alexa items like weather, timers, news and traffic, and users can also type out Alexa commands. Additionally, while Amazon launched its Alexa captioning feature in the US a few months ago, it's now releasing that feature to users in the UK, Germany, Japan, India, France, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. To activate Tap to Alexa, head over to the Echo Show's device settings, select the accessibility settings and switch the feature on.

Technology is everywhere these days but just how smart is your home right now? And how smart can it get in 2018? The answers might surprise you. It's all possible with the coolest smart home innovations available right now and which will soon be commonplace in Kiwi homes. But before we get to the cool appliances that make it all happen, there's something bigger in the background which maxes out the convenience.

But while it conveys change to the jobs market, its implications for higher education and society are paramount. If careers are changing, then it stands to reason that higher education needs to change along with it. Higher education finds itself at the very front of one of the most significant workplace shifts this century, and how it interprets and responds to that change to ensure everybody benefits will have a considerable impact not only on the global flow of students but the whole of society. As tomorrowland approaches, international educators should realise how key the classroom will be. Welcome to the machine Self-driving cars are a typical example of the way artificial intelligence is starting to replace humans in the workforce, says UK-based futurist Calum Chace. Replacing professional drivers not only makes economic sense – a driver can account for up to a half of a vehicle's operational costs – but self-driving cars have proven themselves to be significantly safer than humans.