Director Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival" may be an alien movie, but you won't hear the sounds of warp speed, Martian death rays or beeping robots in it, say supervising sound editor Sylvain Bellemare and re-recording mixer Bernard Gariépy Strobl. "Denis really insisted on having a sound that was not electronic," Bellemare says of the film starring Amy Adams as a linguist trying to communicate with an alien species. "He wanted to do another type of science fiction. So he wanted to use an approach of [making] the sound really organic." Bellemare and Gariépy Strobl knew what they were in for, having worked together on several previous films, including Villeneuve's 2008 short "Next Floor."

Artificial intelligence is moving from science fiction to practical reality fast. AI -- technology that teaches machines to learn so they can perform cognitive tasks and interact with people -- is suddenly accessible to many companies. Costs associated with the advanced computing and data-storage hardware behind AI are plummeting. A growing number of vendors also offer AI tools such as robotic processing automation that can be configured without the help of a rocket scientist. So this is clearly an area more banks will need to pay attention to going forward.

We've all got bills to pay, fiscal responsibilities to meet, retirements to save for -- and we need help. As tens of thousands of chatbots proliferate across Slack, Facebook, and other platforms, you hear naysayers claim that bots might be useful someday but that today they're little more than a gimmick. It's hard to feel that way after you learn about a handful of chatbots that have saved people more than $10 million. Next time you hear someone make that argument, point them to this list, because perhaps nothing is more useful than putting (or keeping) money in your pocket. After its first month, about 100,000 people have interacted with PennyCat, according to maker Leo Kangin.

Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company's popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination. Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post. First, he compared a few sentences from two published versions of "The Great Gatsby," Takashi Nozaki's 1957 translation and Haruki Murakami's more recent iteration, with what this new Google Translate was able to produce. Murakami's translation is written "in very polished Japanese," Rekimoto explained to me later via email, but the prose is distinctively "Murakami-style."

The odds are high, according to recent economic analyses. Indeed, fully 47 percent of all U.S. jobs will be automated "in a decade or two," as the tech-employment scholars Carl Frey and Michael Osborne have predicted. That's because artificial intelligence and robotics are becoming so good that nearly any routine task could soon be automated. Robots and AI are already whisking products around Amazon's huge shipping centers, diagnosing lung cancer more accurately than humans and writing sports stories for newspapers. Last year in Pittsburgh, Uber put its first-ever self-driving cars into its fleet: Order an Uber and the one that rolls up might have no human hands on the wheel at all. Meanwhile, Uber's "Otto" program is installing AI in 16-wheeler trucks--a trend that could eventually replace most or all 1.7 million drivers, an enormous employment category.

They never take days off and never strike -- artificial intelligence is set to replace more than 30 human workers at a Japanese insurance firm. The system will be based on IBM's Watson Explorer technology, and will help calculate payouts to Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance policyholders from January 29, the company said in a statement. IBM describes Watson as "cognitive technology that can think like a human". The AI will scan hospital records and medical certificates, and then extract data on injuries, patient medical histories and administered procedures to determine insurance payouts. Fukoku Life said it hoped the AI would increase productivity by 30 per cent, although final payments will still be processed by human staff.

Colonial First State data scientists are working with a team of computer engineering PhDs from the University of Technology, Sydney, to develop deep learning algorithms to predict investor responses to market shocks and tailor the communication of financial advice. A five-year partnership between Commonwealth Bank of Australia-owned CFS and UTS has resulted in the asset manager providing 20 years of investment and behavioural data for 1 million customers to machine learning researchers at the university, who are using its cutting-edge super-computers to forecast investor reaction. Peter Chun, the general manager of product and investment at Colonial First State, said artificial intelligence and big data analytics will also help the asset manager predict which customers might be more receptive to investment opportunities. He points to the example of the government's non-concessional contribution rules for superannuation; customers have a window of opportunity before June 30 to invest more than the caps.

Asked if a computer will ever be able to give better investment advice than a human, Oliver Bussmann does not hesitate. "I believe it's possible," said Bussmann, who until March was the chief information officer of UBS. Banks' wealth management departments and other investment firms are starting to adopt artificial intelligence. This is different from robo advisers. Those have simplistic, rules-based models -- you give them your age, risk tolerance, goals, and so on and they select a basket of ETFs for you.

A few days ago, AMD (NYSE:AMD) has shown its new professional video/compute card lineup for the enterprise sector and it has recently shown some additional demonstrations about the new Ryzen CPUs. AMD is obviously focusing the public attention around its overall platform, which is becoming more and more interesting, and it is finally providing some very interesting product previews. In this article, I want to focus on the professional video lineup for the enterprise market, that is subdivided into three solutions with three different architectures. As I will show you, the first two solutions are not so competitive due to technical issues and/or outdated architectures, but the top solution, the MI25 powered by the VEGA 10 architecture, looks to be very interesting and competitive. Surely, the initial enthusiasm must be restrained since the architecture is quite late in comparison to Nvidia's (NASDAQ:NVDA) Pascal, while VEGA 10 will probably still show the high power consumption behavior that characterizes Polaris 10 and the entire GCN architecture.

There is no shortage of attention lately on the "Internet of Things". As a case in point, see the "Developing Innovation and Growing the Internet of Things Act" or "DIGIT Act", i.e., S. 2607, a bill introduced in the Senate on March 1, 2016 and amended on September 28, 2016, "to ensure appropriate spectrum planning and inter-agency coordination to support the Internet of Things" – A companion bill, H.R. 5117, was introduced in the House of Representatives on April 28, 2016. However, since there is no "internet" dedicated to "things", it is fair to state that the Internet of Things does not exist as such. We are left with a definitional vacuum, but it is hammering the obvious to acknowledge that there is no dearth of attempts around the world to fill the gap. Perhaps as a helpful shortcut, we could view the expression as a metaphor that captures the arrival of almost anything and everything, until now out of scope, into the communications space.