"Your bones will turn into sand, and upon the sand, a new God will walk. One that will never die," Dolores from American sci-fi television series, Westworld. It's time to face up to reality –Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to play a prominent role across all industries, including recruitment, and it is impossible to avoid. Australia is second only to the US in the growing implementation of AI with two-thirds of businesses already deploying AI and an investment of more than AUD$8.2 million in 2016 alone. To-date, most AI usage in Australia has been within pharmaceuticals, farming and financial services but a series of new talent-related technologies have hit the market making recruitment ripe for disruption.

There was one big name missing from the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (AI) member list when the research consortium was announced last September. Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft all pledged to work together to ensure AI is developed safely and ethically but Apple refused to get involved. Now it looks like the world's largest company and a tech giant renowned for keeping its research efforts a secret may have reconsidered its decision. Citing sources with knowledge of the situation, Bloomberg reported on Thursday that Apple is set to join the elite club, going on to say that its admission could be announced as early as this week. Apple has been gradually building up its AI and machine learning capabilities and buying a succession of small AI startups.

The emerging technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) will inevitably transform the world in many ways – some that are desirable and others that are not. The extent to which the benefits are maximized and the risks mitigated will depend on the quality of governance – the rules, norms, standards, incentives, institutions, and other mechanisms that shape the development and deployment of each particular technology. Too often the debate about emerging technologies takes place at the extremes of possible responses: among those who focus intently on the potential gains and others who dwell on the potential dangers. The real challenge lies in navigating between these two poles: building understanding and awareness of the trade-offs and tensions we face, and making informed decisions about how to proceed. This task is becoming more pressing as technological change deepens and accelerates, and as we become more aware of the lagged societal, political and even geopolitical impact of earlier waves of innovation.

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With CRISPR-based gene drive, however, anyone with the right training could conceivably alter whole ecosystems unless their creation is actively countered and overwritten. In the worst-case scenario, an unopposed "global" gene drive system could spread through every population of the target species in the world, potentially affecting countless people without their consent. While most genetic changes would have no ecological effects whatsoever, we can't know for sure without testing them in small areas (i.e., without a global gene drive), and individuals acting on their own won't have run such tests. Imagine if someone in, say, New Zealand--even a would-be do-gooder--released a "global" gene drive designed to suppress or remove an invasive rat population by spreading infertility. Even if it worked well, possibly saving many endangered species, the construct wouldn't stay in that area.

Ask any marketer what's on their to-do list in 2017, and they'll tell you they have a project underway to achieve a 360-degree view of the customer, Tealium's global CEO, Jeff Lunsford, says. "Any marketer is going to be looking to pull in data about that customer or a prospect from the myriad points where data is available in this new world," he says. "This could be IoT, mobile devices, or customer care. "Every marketer will nod yes, they want to leverage all the data they possibly can. So there's vision sync across the industry, the question is, how to do that." Tealium is one of a growing number of vendors looking to provide that answer with its Universal Data Hub, a software solution aimed at addressing data fragmentation for marketers across online and offline channels. The platform brings together the vendor's AudienceStream and DataAccess solutions with its iQ foundational technology. Since launching six years ago, Tealium has spent several years integrating its offering with more than 1000 applications across the marketing ecosystem, and recently raised another US$35m in capital, off the back of increased investment earlier in 2016, bringing total funding to $112.9m. Tealium now has 750 enterprise customers globally, from small digital-first companies to the largest, mature organisations. Australian clients include Cronulla Sharks, Nude by Nature, Greenstone Financial, and Melbourne University, while Asia-Pacific clients include Cathy Pacific. Speaking to CMO during a visit to Australia this week, Lunsford described Tealium as the "neutral layer down the stack of the marketing cloud", and the common management component organisations need in order to be able to exchange data across multiple best-of-breed systems in real time. Rather than competing with the large marketing cloud providers, he sees Tealium's role as being a complementary component. Not surprisingly, Lunsford sees technology as providing the foundational layer marketers need across customer touchpoints to pull that 360-degree vision off. "Companies use multiple software applications to create the customer experience, each has its own idea of the customer, and most don't talk to each other," he says. "The average Tealium customer has 26 software applications that contribute to the customer experience.

A survey of business leaders has found Australian companies are the worst prepared for the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies among selected major economies, despite spending the second-largest amount of money on automation. Independent research agency Vanson Bourne was commissioned by IT company Infosys (which as a seller of an AI platform has a vested interest in promoting such technology) to poll 1,600 business leaders of companies with more than 1,000 staff and at least US$500m in annual revenue across Australia, China, the United States, Germany, France, India and the UK. According to the survey, released at the World Economic Forum last week, major Australian businesses invested an average of $7.9m last year in AI, behind only the US, but placed last in both the skills required for AI takeup and in plans to integrate AI. The Infosys Australia regional head, Andrew Groth, told the Guardian the survey demonstrates that Australia risks becoming uncompetitive. "The challenge is the skills situation," he said.

Part two of our series "A day in the life of a city" looks at the ways in which offices are changing and how cities are coping with the ever-growing problem of pollution. The morning rush hour is over and, if you live in a city in the developed world, you are likely to be settling down at your desk for the next eight or so hours. However, the office block and skyscraper, which have been part of our urban landscape since the end of the 19th Century, may also soon become surplus to requirements. Urban architect Anthony Townsend thinks cities need more creative approaches to how we work and is keen to reclaim the streets by creating pop-up workspaces in the parks and plazas of the financial district in New York. "Before the New York Stock Exchange, traders met under a tree on Wall Street to buy and sell shares. It is only in the last 50 years that we have taken that creative energy and sucked it up into office buildings and separated it from public space," he said.

A survey of business leaders has found Australian companies are the worst prepared for the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies among selected major economies, despite spending the second-largest amount of money on automation. Independent research agency Vanson Bourne was commissioned by IT company Infosys (which as a seller of an AI platform has a vested interest in promoting such technology) to poll 1,600 business leaders of companies with more than 1,000 staff and at least US$500m in annual revenue across Australia, China, the United States, Germany, France, India and the UK. According to the survey, released at the World Economic Forum last week, major Australian businesses invested an average of $7.9m last year in AI, behind only the US, but placed last in both the skills required for AI takeup and in plans to integrate AI. The Infosys Australia regional head, Andrew Groth, told the Guardian the survey demonstrates that Australia risks becoming uncompetitive. "The challenge is the skills situation," he said.

Artificial intelligence that reads and responds to our emotions is the killer app of the digital economy. It will make customers and employees happier--as long as it learns to respect our boundaries. When psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman visited the Fore tribe in the highlands of Papua New Guinea in 1967, he probably didn't imagine that his work would become the foundation for some of the latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI). After studying the tribe, which was still living in the preliterate state it had been in since the Stone Age, Ekman believed he had found the blueprint for a set of universal human emotions and related expressions that crossed cultures and were present in all humans. A decade later he created the Facial Action Coding System, a comprehensive tool for objectively measuring facial movement.