As automation becomes cheaper and robotics innovation accelerates, how we work and who we work with will change. In this excerpt from their new book, "Machine Platform Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future,"(W.W. Norton & Company) MIT Sloan's Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson identify five areas driving automation and consider where humans fit in the new world of work. San Francisco-based fast causal restaurant Eatsa -- where customers order, pay for, and receive meals without encountering any employees -- wants to do more than virtualize the task of ordering meals; it also wants to automate how they're prepared. Food preparation in its kitchens is highly optimized and standardized, and the main reason the company uses human cooks instead of robots is that the objects being processed -- avocados, tomatoes, eggplants, and so on -- are both irregularly shaped and not completely rigid. These traits present no real problems for humans, who have always lived in a world full of softish blobs. Most of the robots created so far, however, are much better at handling things that are completely rigid and do not vary from one to the next. This is because robots' senses of vision and touch have historically been quite primitive -- far inferior to ours -- and proper handling of a tomato generally entails seeing and feeling it with a lot of precision. It's also because it's been surprisingly hard to program robots to handle squishiness -- here again, we know more than we can tell -- so robot brains have lagged far behind ours, just as their senses have.

While artificial intelligence is becomes a major new tool for marketers, nearly one in two retailers are missing out on leveraging AI marketing to better understand customer behaviours, according to new research. The study, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Emarsys, looked at the growing role of AI in the retail and e-commerce industries. In an industry that's thought to be going through a'creativity crisis', there's some good news for retail marketers amongst the findings: The study, entitled'Building Trust and Confidence: AI Marketing Readiness in Retail and e-Commerce1', sought to understand if there is still a gap between the readiness of AI marketing solutions to execute on real-time B2C marketing campaigns, and the readiness of marketing tech users and business decision makers to adopt AI marketing technology. Businesses polled across US, UK, Germany, France and Australia had revenues from at least $50m to more than $5bn. The study highlighted that marketers and business decision makers polled believe AI-powered marketing will shift the role of marketing toward more strategic work (79%) and make marketing teams more efficient (86%) and effective (86%), as well as enabling them to focus on value-generating tasks as AI automates workflows (82%) and reinventing the way that marketers work (82%).

Seeing AI is a free app that narrates the world around you. Designed for the blind and low vision community, this ongoing research project harnesses the power of AI to open up the visual world and describe nearby people, text, and objects. Optimized for use with VoiceOver, the app enables you to recognize: • Short Text - Speaks text as soon as it appears in front of the camera. Seeing AI is built to help you achieve more by leveraging the power of the cloud and artificial intelligence. As the research progresses, more channels may be added.

The first colony on the moon might be full of robots instead of people, if a plan from the private space company Moon Express works out. It is aiming to build an unmanned lunar outpost, supported by a fleet of spacecraft explorers that would launch from low Earth orbit and deliver supplies to and land on the moon, according to The Verge. The MX explorer fleet would rely on the Electron rocket that the space company Rocket Lab has designed to launch out of New Zealand in order to get into space before heading to the moon. The lunar station, at the moon's south pole, could come as soon as 2020. The plan is to have robots staying around the clock on the moon to mine it for resources like minerals and then sell them, The Verge explains.

Microsoft has used its artificial intelligence chops to automatically add captions to your selfies and guess your age. Now, the company is applying similar tech to a more practical purpose: making everyday life easier for the visually impaired. The company's new Seeing AI app, which is now available for the iPhone, uses the smartphone's camera to detect and describe nearby people, text, and objects. The app not only recognizes a person based on his or her face, but can also relay mood based on facial expressions, estimate a person's proximity to the user, and describe physical characteristics. In a demo video, Seeing AI provided a description of a woman smiling by saying: "28 year old female wearing glasses looking happy."

A privately owned company plans to use robotic spacecraft to launch a series of commercial missions to the moon, some 45 years after NASA s last lunar landing, officials said on Wednesday. Cape Canaveral, Florida-based Moon Express is developing a fleet of low-cost robotic spacecraft that can be assembled like Legos to handle increasingly complex missions, founder and Chief Executive Officer Bob Richards said in an interview. Ultimately the company plans to establish a lunar outpost in 2020 and set up commercial operations on the Moon, mining material and returning it to Earth to sell. The initial spacecraft, known as MX-1E,is a similar size and shape to the R2D2 droid from Star Wars, and is slated to fly before the end of the year aboard a Rocket Lab Electron booster, which launches from New Zealand. Google is offering a top prize of $20 million for the first privately funded team to land a spacecraft on the moon; have it fly, drive or hop at least 1,640 feet (500 meters) and relay pictures and video back to Earth.

Microsoft released a new app for iOS devices called Seeing AI. The app uses computer vision to provide verbal description for users who are blind or visually impaired. The Seeing AI app was developed by Research AI, an incubation hub inside Microsoft Research. Microsoft actually first showed off a prototype of the app back in March of last year during its Build conference. The Seeing AI app is very simple to use.

Facebook is going to start pushing more adverts out to users, the company has revealed. It's set to introduce ads to Messenger, its chat platform, which Facebook users have to install in order to message other users. The company has hinted that it's close to maxing out the total number of ads it can squeeze into people's News Feeds, and adding more of them to Messenger appears to be its solution. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Google's parent company -- has an artificial intelligence company, called DeepMind. The company has developed an AI that has managed to learn how to walk, run, jump, and climb without any prior guidance. The result is as impressive as it is goofy. Get the latest Google stock price here. Site highlights each day to your inbox.

But the reality is that companies everywhere are still struggling with the fundamentals of developing and executing a solid CX strategy and based on conversations I've had with CX professionals, I can understand their frustration. Let's embrace the fact that more companies are working on CX and making it a priority and in the process making it better. As an example, earlier this year I helped organise a CX Journey Mapping workshop led by our own Steve Nuttall. In the session were, among others, representatives from a prominent men's fashion line who admitted that they were working against the clock to get their channels organised and bring CX to the forefront of their business. They admitted that their competitors are beginning to quickly pull away as they invest in cloud services and with Amazon coming to Australia, it seems clear to their team that the idea of waiting or dawdling will surely only lead to misery on the bottom line.