This blog post was guest-written by Annie O'Rourke, CEO of Digital Workforce Australia and 89 Degrees East. She will be guest speaking about'Addressing real world problems with Artificial Intelligence' session of the Women Rock-IT series on 17 October. To sign up for this or other webinars in the series, click here. Don't tell my husband, but I've recently started an affair. No need to be too shocked though, because I'm pretty sure I can package it as so-called ethical polygamy.

Hugo de Garis is one of the first AGI thinkers that I came across in 2012, when I decided to focus my life on the post-human transition. Aside from Bostrom and Al-Rodhan, few thinkers molded my early ideas about AGI and transhumanism more than de Garis. I believe that two of his ideas are extremely important, and are somewhat absent in most of the artificial general intelligence conversations today (and even most of the discussions from 2010-2014). Those ideas are what de Garis calls "Globism" (global world order) and "Cosmism" (the belief that humanity should create diety-level machine intelligences). The following screenshot is from de Garis's (seemingly neglected) online blog: Since first exploring Kurzweil's ideas in The Singularity is Near, it seemed evident to me that the default mode of technology development would be competition – the economic or military "state of nature" – and that conflict is extremely likely if new forms of thinking and valuing come into existence.

Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near peaked my interest when he posited his reasoning for why there is likely no intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. By a mere matter of odds, most of us assume (likely myself included) that there simply must be some kind of super-intelligent species "out there somewhere." One of the many postulations made (the book is more than worth reading), is that species might – at the point of attaining a certain degree of capacity or intelligence – destroy themselves. Could be bombs, could be nanotechnologies, could be super-intelligent computers – but something batters them back to the stone age – or worse. In thinking recently on topics related to ethical enhancement and human enhancement in general, I came to the notion that this "self-extermination theory" might pan out in some other interesting and less considered ways.

Technological advances such as cashless stores and apps that help fill more restaurant seats with hungry diners aren't the only latest trends. Some of the latest innovations we've seen at Foodable are introducing technological advances, like robots, to the grocery store space. Grocery chain Stop and Shop, is partnering with mobile market startup Robomart to bring a new method of grocery delivery to Boston this Spring. Instead of having customers order their groceries and deliver them to the door, customers will be able to order a remote-operated Robomart vehicle to their door via an app and pick out their own produce from a pre-stocked vehicle. Another way technology is becoming more prevalent in the grocery store space is shown by Giant Food Stores.

Clearly alarmed by shifting public perceptions about facial recognition technology and the potential for state and local governments to impose an outright ban on the use of such technology, tech vendors and other businesses offering facial recognition technology solutions are now mobilizing their forces. They are reaching out to U.S. congressional leadership, urging the House and Senate to re-think any initiatives to impose a "blanket moratorium" on the use of facial recognition technology. And, at the same time, they are rushing to the legal defense of big Silicon Valley tech firms such as Facebook, which is facing a major class action lawsuit in the state of Illinois over the wrongful use of biometric facial data. In one highly public move, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote an open letter on facial recognition technology, which was addressed to the top political leaders in both the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. The letter on facial recognition technology urges political leaders to consider all the positive uses of the technology.

Following the wider skills and talent package announced by the UK government earlier this year, we are now pleased to announce the appointment of five new and highly talented Turing AI Fellows. The Office for Artificial Intelligence, The Alan Turing Institute and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) have worked together to successfully attract the Turing AI Fellows, some of the best research talent from around the world. To continue attracting outstanding AI talent, a new call for the Turing AI Acceleration Fellowship is now open. In addition, details of the Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowships have also been released and this call will open in early November. Together, both calls have received £37.5 million of investment to support a number of fellows over five years.

The U.S. government, long a proponent of advancing technology for military purposes, sees artificial intelligence as key to the next generation of fighting tools. Several recent investments and Pentagon initiatives show that military leaders are concerned about keeping up with – and ahead of – China and Russia, two countries that have made big gains in developing artificial-intelligence systems. AI-powered weapons include target recognition systems, weapons guided by AI, and cyberattack and cyberdefense software that runs without human intervention. The U.S. defense community is coming to understand that AI will significantly transform, if not completely reinvent, the world's military power balance. The concern is more than military.

Sana Benefits, an Austin company that wants to disrupt the healthcare insurance industry with more efficient software, said it has raised $6.3 million in seed funding. The company joins a raft of upstarts disrupting a notoriously inefficient healthcare system. These startups include players like Oscar Health, Clover, and Bright Health -- all of which have raised hundreds of millions to billions of dollars over the last few years. Most of them have been focused on individuals and not as much on the employer plans that cover half of Americans. Sana distinguishes itself in that it's one of the few new providers focused on providers, and specifically the market for small and medium sized businesses (a thousand or fewer employees).

It has since been updated to include the most relevant information available.] I attended a meeting of startup founders who pitched their companies. Interestingly enough, many of them touted their use of artificial intelligence. This technology has quickly become red-hot. After all, the market opportunity is massive. Gartner estimates that spending on AI will grow at an average compound annual growth rate of 18%, reaching $383.5 billion by 2020.

The recent rapid development of pretrained language models has produced significant performance improvements on downstream NLP tasks. These pretrained language models compile and store relational knowledge they encounter in training data, which prompted Facebook AI Research and University College London to introduce their LAMA (LAnguage Model Analysis) probe to explore the feasibility of using language models as knowledge bases. The term "knowledge base" was introduced in the 1970s. Unlike databases which store figures, tables, and other straightforward data in computer memory, a knowledge base is able to store more complex structured and unstructured information. A knowledge base system can be likened to a library that stores facts in a specific field.