"AI will be as central to the white-collar office environment as robotics has been to the production economy," said Mark Muro, senior fellow and policy director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. "They'll fundamentally change what work is and what humans do. And no one gets a free pass." What's happening: A new analysis released Wednesday by Brookings overlaid the keywords in AI-related patents with job descriptions to get a more detailed understanding of which jobs are most likely to be affected by AI -- and where they are. The big picture: Much of the research assessing the workforce impact of these new technologies -- robotics, AI and machine learning -- lumps them all together under the bucket of automation.

"Artificial Intelligence" is currently the hottest buzzword in tech. And with good reason - after decades of research and development, the last few years have seen a number of techniques that have previously been the preserve of science fiction slowly transform into science fact. Already AI techniques are a deep part of our lives: AI determines our search results, translates our voices into meaningful instructions for computers and can even help sort our cucumbers (more on that later). In the next few years we'll be using AI to drive our cars, answer our customer service enquiries and, well, countless other things. But how did we get here?

Experimental self-driving car, based on modified Ford automobile, with Lidar and other sensors ... [ ] visible, in the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco, California, June 10, 2019. Testing self-driving vehicles on public roads remains a scary prospect for citizens of communities where that's happening but a six-month old consortium of major automakers and ride-share companies has taken a step towards removing some of that fear, by addressing the human element. An operator sits in the driver's seat of a Toyota Motor Corp. Prius hybrid car, operated by ... [ ] Yandex.Taxi, part of Yandex.NV, during a self-driving taxi trial on open roads in Moscow, Russia, on Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2019. Yandex, Russia's largest search engine that successfully expanded to online taxi and swallowed Uber Technologies Inc. operations in the country, started testing self-driving cars in 2017. The humans are what's known as in-vehicle fallback test drivers.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a system that can accurately locate a shooter based on video recordings from as few as three smartphones. When demonstrated using three video recordings from the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas that left 58 people dead and hundreds wounded, the system correctly estimated the shooter's actual location--the north wing of the Mandalay Bay hotel. The estimate was based on three gunshots fired within the first minute of what would be a prolonged massacre. Alexander Hauptmann, research professor in CMU's Language Technologies Institute, said the system, called Video Event Reconstruction and Analysis (VERA), won't necessarily replace the commercial microphone arrays for locating shooters that public safety officials already use, although it may be a useful supplement for public safety when commercial arrays aren't available. One key motivation for assembling VERA was to create a tool that could be used by human rights workers and journalists who investigate war crimes, terrorist acts and human rights violations, Hauptmann said.

Compliance is a must-do activity, not a nice-to-have. It is essential that companies extract maximum value from compliance processes, reducing the possibility of it being considered a cost centre. Technological innovation can help to lift some of the compliance burden. The level of technology you can realistically implement depends on how advanced the organisation is to start with. One company's moonshot could be another's business as usual.

Whatever happened to the "smart city?" It's alive and well but morphing into the "hyperconnected city," powered by data analytics, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), and other advanced technologies. Among the goals: Create new business opportunities, increase the efficiency of government processes, and improve public safety and health, according to a new study by research firm ESI ThoughtLab and sponsored by Oracle. Those benefits will come with a discernible return on investment that increases as connectivity expands, the report maintains. One surprising finding is the extent to which hyperconnected cities--even some with huge technology investments--admit to being largely unprepared for cyberattacks.

Self-driving technology company Waymo is testing out self-driving semi-trucks in Phoenix. The trucks are currently on roads in metro Phoenix and on I-10 between the city and Tucson. Matt Carroll is a project manager at Waymo. He said fully loaded, the trucks can weigh up to 80,000 pounds and can be 75 feet long. Waymo started testing the trucks in 2017.

Are you one of those writers who struggles to find topics to write about? I hear that a lot: "I just don't have any ideas!" So I decided to take a few minutes and find some article ideas for you. Seriously, I did not spend hours gathering the ideas for this post. I collected press releases for a week that come in my inbox due to my long history as a business reporter, and then took perhaps 5 minutes apiece to think on them.

Despite that old saying, lightning can--and often does--strike the same area twice. It's detrimental to farmers as lightning causes fires that can destroy millions of dollars' worth of crops. And, it kills more people each year than tornadoes or hurricanes. But right now, our only real warning system is storm clouds. Simply put: we have difficulty predicting exactly when these giant electrical charges will strike.

A business that leverages virtual process analysis to accelerate digital transformation through imitation learning is one of three startups to win ISG Startup Challenges at events hosted this fall by Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm. FortressIQ, the San Francisco-based startup that uses AI-based computer vision to "learn" business tasks as they occur in real time, won the ISG Startup Challenge at the inaugural ISG Agile Enterprise Summit October 28 in Boston. Beth Bourg, FortressIQ's marketing director, delivered the winning pitch to an independent panel of judges, and was chosen the winner in a live audience poll. "The first-ever ISG Agile Enterprise Summit explored the benefits of becoming an agile organization and building a culture of continuous improvement," said Karen Healy, partner and global leader, ISG Events. "We were thrilled to hear compelling pitches on emerging solutions that increase efficiency and agility in new and exciting ways. The audience choice, FortressIQ, offers an innovative, automated solution to discover and document processes that are ripe for automation, saving both time and money."