Twice a week, we'll be highlighting the latest bot and artificial intelligence news here on the Bot or Not Medium blog. This week, we have bots running countries, companies and social engagements. Will bots eventually rule the world, like in the movies? See below for a summary, and stay tuned for more bots news next week! Real-time bots have grown exponentially smarter in the last decade.

We live in a world of information abundance. The ability to create, produce, market and distribute content in almost any form has become very easy. So easy that a shocking amount of what we're reading is created not by humans, but by computer algorithms - perhaps even this post;). In the most recent post on strategy4telcomediatech I highlighted the need to consider the role that'bots' play particularly in automating conversational commerce - 'sales and service'. In this post I take a look at the use of'bots' or algorithmic content in digital media, how it is shaping our consumption habits, content creation and some of the capabilities required in both traditional and new media organisations. Algorithms and natural language generators have been around for a while.

The writing is on the LED screen: our jobs are ours for as long as the robots don't want them. But no one could have predicted they'd come for the gallery guides first. The world's first humanoid robot has started taking tours at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) – two a month, for now. It seems a cruel twist of fate to have art history graduates among the first to be made redundant by robots; they have a hard enough time finding work as it is. But when I travel to AGWA to meet the future of work, it is plugged into the wall, charging.

It was as far back as 1991 – when Nirvana's Nevermind was riding high in the album charts, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was the must-see film in cinemas; and escalating tensions led to the first Gulf War – that we had a sneak preview of how networked connectivity would eventually impact our lives. That year, researchers at the University of Cambridge Computer Labs invented the world's first webcam to solve their coffee problem. Frustrated by pointless trips down the hall to the coffee machine only to find the pot empty, they set up a video camera near the machine and networked it to a computer. Now they could see whether the coffee pot was full or empty in real time. Today billions of devices across the world are networked, sharing what they see, hear and otherwise sense with the internet.

In a disused military aircraft hangar buried deep in a granite hillside, Johan Tofeldt flicks a switch on the future of mining. "Look, no hands!" he beams, as the truck lurches backwards and executes a precise reverse. "It's a little heavy on the clutch, but then it's not designed for driver comfort." The cheerful Swede is sitting in a standard Volvo FMX heavy duty truck, a haulage industry workhorse. But where once there was a narrow bed behind the seat there is now a laptop and a tangle of wires.

The true value of the Internet of Things is when it is used in conjunction with autonomous devices and machine learning, according to SAS' chief analytics officer for Australia and New Zealand, Evan Stubbs. Speaking at the SAS Analytics Insights event in Sydney yesterday, he said that IoT is just a small part of the "bigger revolution that's going on", which includes big data, analytics, machine learning and automation. "The Internet of Things in isolation is really boring at the end of the day," he said. "The exciting thing about the Internet of Things is the fact that it can create an entire army of autonomous devices linked to a central intelligence that can make decisions for us. "So the fact that your toaster has an IP address – who cares?

Any-angle pathfinding is a fundamental problem in robotics and computer games. The goal is to find a shortest path between a pair of points on a grid map such that the path is not artificially constrained to the points of the grid. Prior research has focused on approximate online solutions. A number of exact methods exist but they all require super-linear space and pre-processing time. In this study, we describe Anya: a new and optimal any-angle pathfinding algorithm. Where other works find approximate any-angle paths by searching over individual points from the grid, Anya finds optimal paths by searching over sets of states represented as intervals. Each interval is identified on-the-fly. From each interval Anya selects a single representative point that it uses to compute an admissible cost estimate for the entire set. Anya always returns an optimal path if one exists. Moreover it does so without any offline pre-processing or the introduction of additional memory overheads. In a range of empirical comparisons we show that Anya is competitive with several recent (sub-optimal) online and pre-processing based techniques and is up to an order of magnitude faster than the most common benchmark algorithm, a grid-based implementation of A*.

Even in the 1990s, when Australian banks copped a lot of flak for closing branches, consumer behaviour was changing. The banks may not have undertaken their branch network rationalisations in the most amenable fashion for the wider community but even then, as data from the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority show, actual points of representation didn't change as much as the headlines suggested. Indeed, points of representation actually increased for 11 straight years from 2001, the first year APRA started compiling proper data. The shift from traditional branch banking and physical currency has been immense. But the next generational shift in financial services – and services more generally – will be even more confronting.

They say that kids aren't born sexist or racist--hate is taught. Artificial intelligence is the same way, and humans are fabulous teachers. ProPublica reported, for example, that an algorithm used to to predict the likelihood of convicts committing future crime tends to tag black folks as higher risk than whites. Despite the oft-repeated claim that such data-driven approaches are more objective than past methods of determining the risk of recidivism or anything else, it's clear that our very human biases have rubbed off on our machines. Consider the case of Microsoft's simple Tay bot, which sucked up all the slurs and racist opinions that Twitter users threw at it and ended up spouting Nazi drivel.

IMAGE: Dr. Ben Choi, associate professor of computer science at Louisiana Tech University, will present his research on a groundbreaking new technology that has the potential to revolutionize the computing industry... view more RUSTON, La. - Dr. Ben Choi, associate professor of computer science at Louisiana Tech University, will present his research on a groundbreaking new technology that has the potential to revolutionize the computing industry during a keynote speech next month at the International Conference on Measurement Instrumentation and Electronics. Choi will present on a foundational architecture for designing and building computers, which will utilize multiple values rather than binary as used by current computers. The many-valued logic computers should provide faster computation by increasing the speed of processing for microprocessors and the speed of data transfer between the processors and the memory as well as increasing the capacity of the memory. This technology has the potential to redefine the computing industry, which is constantly trying to increase the speed of computation and, in recent years, has run short of options. By providing a new hardware approach, the technology will push the speed limit of computing using a progressive approach which will move from two values to four values, then to eight values, then to 16 values, and so on. Future computers could be built using this many-valued approach.