The following post is the second in a two-part series on the impact of robots on the workplace and the labor force. In the previous post, St. Louis Fed Economist Maximiliano Dvorkin and Research Associate Asha Bharadwaj analyzed the growing use of industrial robots in advanced industrial economies. They discussed how the use is distributed among different industries. The question that remains unanswered: How might the growth in robots affect local labor markets? "For instance, some workers in the automotive industry, possibly those conducting more manual and routine tasks, may be experiencing job losses as more and more of these jobs are automated by the use of robots," they wrote.

There is no longer any credible reason to deny our part in the climate crisis. We are now facing the destruction of vital ecosystems, and every year 12.6 million people die because of environmental pollution. Cutting edge smart city technologies may be our most useful weapon in the fight against the climate crisis, helping us to reduce our impact on the planet in future, and alleviate the damage we have already done. Part two of this series will focus on how smart cities can help us tackle the looming climate crisis, and which technologies will be used to ensure cities continue to be sustainable as our planet and population dramatically change. Once we have planned out cities that are adaptable and better suited to our needs, we can start implementing smart technologies to overhaul unsustainable utilities, transport and energy systems.

In a collaboration project between Helsinki University Hospital (HUS), Kuopio University Hospital and Turku University Hospital (all Finland), a team of researchers have presented the first artificial intelligence (AI) based algorithm that has the potential to assist in treating patients with severe TBI in intensive care units (ICUs). Patients with the most severe cases of TBI are usually treated in ICUs, however, despite the high-quality care, recent observational studies have reported mortality rates of approximately 30%. Patients who suffer from severe TBI are unconscious, therefore, it is a challenge to accurately monitor their condition. In ICUs many tens of variables, such as intercranial pressure and mean arterial pressure, are continuously monitored to assess the patient's condition. One variable alone could yield hundreds of thousands of data points per day, making it impossible for ICU staff to fully analyze.

But some transhumanists hope to slowly morph into "immortal cyborgd" with endlessly replaceable parts. Did you recently welcome a child into the world? An upstanding responsible parent such as yourself is surely doing all you can to prepare your little one for all the pitfalls life has in store. However, thanks to technology, children born in 2014 may face a far different set of issues than you ever had to. And we're not talking about simply learning to master a new generation of digital doohickeys, we're talking about living in a world in which the very definition of "human" becomes blurred.

But rather than impeding the pace of innovation, these concerns are prompting many corporate security chiefs to accelerate the development of advanced capabilities, in a bid to turn the tables on attackers by better detecting the misuse of data and keeping it safe. "Artificial intelligence is a backbone of security initiatives," Camille François, chief innovation officer of social-media analytics firm Graphika Inc., said Tuesday at the WSJ Pro Cybersecurity Executive Forum in New York. Among other applications, AI is being used in cyberattack modeling, where smart tools identify security vulnerabilities in simulated breaches or hacks, Ms. François said. Separate subscription required for some articles. The strategy is to approach your own systems like a hacker, she added, allowing AI-powered apps to find areas that need stronger security features.

While many – if not most – Federal agencies are taking at least preliminary steps towards embracing advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), they are moving with a degree of justifiable caution when it comes to relying on those technologies as part of their cybersecurity defenses, government tech officials said today at an event presented by Fortinet. The measured pace of AI and ML for security purposes is tied to the crucial nature of the cybersecurity mission, panelists said. Frank Konieczny, Chief Technology Officer at the U.S. Air Force, said that ML tech in particular requires establishing baselines for access and security to be sure that adversaries are not already impacting relevant data. And, he said, resulting data outputs from ML applications can still be somewhat opaque, and need to be examined more closely by human operators. "You ask, 'how did it figure that one out,'" he said, adding that process results in "a lot of time … by a human looking at [the result] again, which we don't want to do."

Artificial intelligence is becoming an integral feature of most distributed computing architectures. As such, AI hardware accelerators have become a principal competitive battlefront in high tech, with semiconductor manufacturers such as NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel at the forefront. In recent months, vendors of AI hardware acceleration chips have stepped up their competitive battles. One of the most recent milestones was Intel's release of its new AI-optimized Ponte Vecchio generation of graphical processing units (GPUs), which is the first of several products from a larger Xe family of GPUs that will also accelerate gaming and high-performance computing workloads. In AI hardware acceleration, NVIDIA has been the chip vendor to beat, owing to its substantial market lead in GPUs and its continued enhancements in the chips' performance, cost, efficiency, and other features.

We are all searching for new paradigms. Democracy is broken, capitalism questionable and the environment a disaster. Our views used to be simple to be identified, tagged, and sold to, but social media has obliterated that. We now live in a community of one, just me. All social media feeds reinforce my views, exclude challenges to my values, and allow me to live in my own bubble in isolation without the need to consider the opinions of others.

Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.

Organizations that use artificial intelligence to make decisions should be transparent and consider the effects on individuals, a U.K. regulator says in draft guidance. The draft, unveiled Dec. 2 by the Information Commissioner's Office and co-released by the Alan Turig Institute, the U.K.'s national data science and artificial intelligence institute, aims to help organizations explain AI decisions about individuals. Organizations should consider AI systems' context and effects in order to explain that their use won't harm people's wellbeing, according to the draft. The ICO is accepting comments on the draft until Jan. 24. "The decisions made using AI need to be properly understood by the people they impact," Simon McDougall, executive director for technology policy and innovation at the data protection agency, wrote in a blog post.