Annalee Newitz is the Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica. Her work focuses on cultural impact of science and technology. She founded the science and science fiction blog io9.com, and is the author of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. Her first novel, Autonomous, comes out in September 2017. She has a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley, and was the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT.

Autonomous cars will dominate the streets by 2022, according to Nissan-Renault-Mitsubishi Alliance Chairman Carlos Ghosn. The firm, which has an established autonomous car program, wants to give drivers control of their cars; their autonomous cars are not driverless cars -- instead, drivers can decide when they want to drive and when they want the car to drive for them. Ghosn says that autonomous cars provide a "huge advantage" for drivers, and as a result, the industry will have "massive growth" in the coming years. Instead of focusing on the road for hours at a time, people can "rest … relax … see a movie" while the car does its work for them. With autonomous cars featured heavily in news reports -- and even spotted in several testing-ground locations in the United States -- the hype surrounding autonomous cars begs the question: when will we see autonomous cars on the road?

Marketers are increasingly using more channels to reach customers, pondering their strategy for artificial intelligence and augmenting email, which delivers solid returns, with new technologies. Those takeaways were among the highlights of a survey conducted by Salesforce. Executives walked through the findings with a customer at Salesforce's New York office. Salesforce's State of Marketing Report is based on a survey of 3,500 marketing pros in the US, Canada, Brazil, Ireland, the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. The survey was based on Salesforce customers, but likely applies to a broader set of marketing professionals.

When travelling abroad, it can be difficult to communicate with those who don't speak the same language as you. But thankfully, the days of having to quickly flick through your translation dictionary could soon be a thing of the past. A technology firm has launched a new earpiece called One2One which translates spoken conversations within seconds. The incredible earpiece, which is powered by IBM Watson's artificial intelligence system, will hit global markets next month. The device supports translations across eight languages – English, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German and Chinese.

Since the plagues of the Old Testament, we have contemplated the Apocalypse, the world rising in vengeance as men, women and children scurry across the brutal landscape of a lost paradise. Our doomsday stories and how they scroll and flash before us have changed since the parchment days of the Bible. But we remain fascinated by the specter of our demise, whether the end is wrought by deities, our own folly or imposed by outside forces like monsters, asteroids and aliens that have haunted us since Orson Welles' 1938 "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast. Few of our dystopias, however, are as frightening as the planet gone asunder, polluted and destroyed by humanity's amorality, recklessness and greed. Film and literature -- to say nothing of our private insecurities -- resound with a world that freezes, boils, chokes, cracks with earthquakes, dwindles with resources and succumbs to pestilence and disease.

An Australian startup revealed its flagship product, an earpiece that can interpret 8 different languages in real-time, at a United Nations event in Switzerland on Friday. Lingmo International, a startup based in West Gosford north of Sydney, launched its TranslateOne2One earpiece at the UN's Artificial Intelligence for Good Summit in Geneva, revealing that IBM Watson machine learning technology had been used for its algorithms. Traditionally, converting one language to another orally in real-time is called "interpreting" whereas the term "translation" is reserved for processing text across languages with some delay. Lingmo founder Danny May, however, describes his product as performing "translation in real-time". And what I mean by independent is that it doesn't require any connectivity to your phone by Bluetooth or wi-fi.

As more video providers finding audiences directly through apps and the web -- and away from pay-TV-based packages -- we're seeing the emergence of more analytics to measure how those videos are delivered, and who is watching them. Conviva, a company that has developed a set machine-learning-based algorithms to do just that, today announced that it has raised $40 million from strategic, new and existing investors to continue building out its platform and business. Investors include Australia's sovereign wealth fund Future Fund, NEA, Foundation Capital, and Time Warner Investments. The company is not disclosing its valuation, but a source close to the company confirms that it is around $300 million. Conviva has raised $121 million to date. If you've had your eye on the streaming video industry for a while, you'll know that Conviva is not exactly a spring chicken.

Harry Chiang is a Financial Analyst at I Know First. "The big paradox here is that people think technology will lead to banking becoming more and more automated and less and less personalized, but what we've seen coming through here is the view that technology will actually help banking become a lot more personalized." Over the past few years, news articles have casually floated the term'Artificial Intelligence' around at an increasing rate. It's one of those buzzwords that somehow finds its way in to every tech-related conversation. Even the least tech-savvy person has a vague notion of what it is. The problem is, some of the more tech-savvy person don't have a much clearer notion of what it is either. The definition of AI ranges and has vague boundaries.

It was a hectic but interesting week at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Singapore. Computer/robotic vision and navigation-related (SLAM, localization) are still some of the most popular, or at least well-attended fields at these conferences. My colleagues said that some of the manipulation / grasping sessions were well attended too. The influence and growth in machine learning / deep learning seems to have slowed somewhat. This is possibly related to the fact we're increasingly seeing some of the best robotics learning work going to machine learning or computer vision conferences, or potentially to new conferences like the Conference on Robot Learning.

When Swedbank customers face a problem, they reach out to Nina, the bank's virtual assistant. Visitors to Mizuho Bank are greeted by Pepper, a humanoid robot standing four feet tall. Santander allows payments to be activated by voice, and JP Morgan Chase now uses machine learning to review commercial loan agreements in seconds, a task that used to take 3,60,000 manhours every year. Wherever you look in the world of financial services, you will find some form of artificial intelligence (AI) at work. AI technologies such as machine learning and speech recognition are quietly working behind the scenes to improve lending decisions and prevent fraud.