Hold onto your job - artificial intelligence (AI) is driving us through a fourth industrial revolution. Up to half our existing jobs will be replaced by robots, nanotechnology and AI within 10 to 15 years and many are warning New Zealand business is woefully unprepared. Sophie is Air New Zealand's face of digital disruption. Soon she may be booking your flight. Sophie was made by New Zealand-based company Soul Machines, which is about to roll out digital employees to some major companies.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. I like the design, but it costs over $1,100. Apollo is a fixed-base manipulation platform at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems who seems to enjoy playing with puny humans.

On May 18th, 2012, attorneys for Oracle and Google were battling over nine lines of code in a hearing before Judge William H. Alsup of the northern district of California. The first jury trial in Oracle v. Google, the fight over whether Google had hijacked code from Oracle for its Android system, was wrapping up. The argument centered on a function called rangeCheck. Of all the lines of code that Oracle had tested -- 15 million in total -- these were the only ones that were "literally" copied. Every keystroke, a perfect duplicate. It was in Oracle's interest to play up the significance of rangeCheck as much as possible, and David Boies, Oracle's lawyer, began to argue that Google had copied rangeCheck so that it could take Android to market more quickly. Judge Alsup was not buying it. "I couldn't have told you the first thing about Java before this trial," said the judge. "But, I have done and still do a lot of programming myself in other languages. I have written blocks of code like ...

The ambush in Niger earlier this month that left four U.S. troops dead has been the subject of immense speculation, not only concerning President Trump's public response to the tragedy but also about what actually happened on the ground that day. Asked by Fox News on Capitol Hill if the administration has been forthcoming about the attack, Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., replied, "of course not" and added, "it may require a subpoena." Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday that the attack is under investigation. A dozen U.S. Army soldiers, mostly Green Berets, along with 30 Nigerians, traveled 125 miles north of Niger's capital, Niamey, in unarmored trucks on a routine mission and to meet with local village elders in Tonga Tonga, near the border with Mali, on Oct. 4. U.S. Army Sergeant La David Johnson was killed when his patrol was ambushed in Niger.

Read the full ABC article and watch the video interview to learn more about Tanmay and his work in the field of AI. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) recently profiled 13-year-old Canadian tech prodigy Tanmay Bakshi who started using computers at age five, launched his first app at age nine, and has been working with IBM's AI and cognitive APIs for a couple of years now. Tanmay is in a different league from the average pre-teen. In 2013, at age nine, he built "tTables," an app to help kids learn multiplication which Apple's App Store accepted after rejecting it three times. An incredible achievement for a child who loves to code but is largely self-taught.

WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Wednesday for the U.S. and India to expand strategic ties. He also pointedly criticized China, which he accused of challenging international norms needed for global stability. Tillerson's remarks on relations between the world's two largest democracies, ahead of his first trip to South Asia as secretary of state, risked endearing Washington to one Asian power while alienating another. Tillerson said the world needed the U.S. and India to have a strong partnership. He said the two nations share goals of security, free navigation, free trade and fighting terrorism in the Indo-Pacific, and serve as "the Eastern and Western beacons" for an international rules-based order that is increasingly under strain.

Istanbul, a city of 14 million people and a crossroads of cultural exchange dating back millennia, may also be where Turkey's next major earthquake strikes. Cities along the North Anatolian Fault, which stretches from eastern Turkey to the Aegean Sea, have experienced an advancing series of strong quakes during the past 80 years, beginning in 1939 when a devastating 7.8-magnitude rupture leveled the city of Erzincan and killed 33,000 people. Most recently, in 1999, 7.4-magnitude quake near the city of İzmit left 17,000 dead and half a million homeless. A few months later, another shock hit Düzce, 60 miles away. Brendan Meade, an applied computational scientist and associate professor of earth and planetary sciences, recently built a computer model of conditions in the North Anatolian Fault.

Telstra has used open source machine learning technology to answer the age-old question that plagues every marketer: how effective is my ad spend? The telco wields one of the biggest marketing budgets in Australia, but that doesn't stop Telstra from wanting to track the performance of every dollar spent. The company previously faced a six-month lag to get visibility into the effectiveness of its marketing spend; that is now down to five weeks using new marketing mix modelling developed in partnership with Accenture, Deakin University and Servian. The telco previously used a traditional econometric model to assess the performance of its marketing spend, pulling together 800 variables – which took two-and-a-half months to assemble – and then modelling this using regression techniques. "Six months after the marketing period had ended I could tell the CMO [chief marketing officer] and the marketers how effective their marketing was... six months ago," Telstra's director of research, insights & analytics Liz Moore told the recent Big Data & Analytics Innovation Summit in Sydney.

In the hope of making drone deliveries even more accurate, Project Wing has started making deliveries directly to people's houses in southeastern Australia. The firm announced that it will deliver food from Mexican food chain, Guzman y Gomez, and medicines from Chemist Warehouse pharmacies to customers in rural areas on the border of the Australian Capital Territory and New South Wales. Project Wing, which is run by Google parent Alphabet, hopes the trials will help to fine-tune how its drones move goods from where they're located to where they're needed. In the hope of making drone deliveries even more accurate, Alphabet's Project Wing has started making deliveries directly to people's houses in southeastern Australia Project Wing's aircraft has a wingspan of approximately 1.5m (4.9ft) and have four electrically-driven propellers. The total weight, including the package to be delivered, is approximately 10kg (22lb). The aircraft itself accounts for the bulk of that at 8.5kg (18.7lb).

Apparently, Project Wing brought airborne burritos to Virginia Tech last year as preparation for something bigger. Alphabet X's experimental project is now dropping burritos (and medicine) from the skies of Australia as part of a series of tests to figure out how to run a drone delivery service efficiently. Project Wing Co-Lead James Ryan Burgess said they've teamed up with Australia Mexican food chain Guzman y Gomez and pharmacy chain Chemist Warehouse to drop off orders to testers living in a rural area. These testers usually have to take a 40-minute round trip by car to get to the nearest grocery or restaurant, making them the perfect subjects for Wing's experiments. Project Wing has to conduct these tests, because while it has a system that can pre-configure routes, its drones rely on on-board sensors to avoid obstacles.