A Baxter robot of Rethink Robotics picks up a business card as it performs during a display at the World Economic Forum, in China's port city Dalian Thomson Reuters "There's just doesn't seem to be many blacksmith jobs these days." At first glance, this would be a ridiculous thing to say. We live in a modern society and machines do a way better job of making things from metal anyways. What if machines are better at driving long-haul trucks? What if machines are better servers at McDonald's?

The result is that the massive computer power so harnessed helps us to analyse what has happened in the past and, with the use of predictive analytics techniques, opens a window leading to accurate predictions. Undoubtedly, artificial intelligence is fast becoming a major technology for prescriptive analytics, the step beyond predictive analytics that helps us determine how to implement and/or optimise optimal decisions. In business applications, it can assess future risks and quantify probabilities, giving us insights into how to improve market penetration, customer satisfaction, security analysis, trade execution and fraud detection and prevention, while proving indispensable in land and air-traffic control, national security and defence, not to mention a host of healthcare applications such as patientspecific treatments for diseases and illnesses. Typically, the giant search engine firm Google is a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, developing self-driving automobiles, smartphone assistants and other examples of machine learning, while it is no secret that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and actor Ashton Kutcher recently invested 40 million in a project focusing on developing artificial brains. In science fiction films such as Matrix, we have seen how futuristic devices will facilitate facial recognition, interpret human comments and perform complex language translations.

According to some prominent voices in the tech world, artificial intelligence presents a looming existential threat to humanity: Warnings by luminaries like Mr Elon Musk and Professor Nick Bostrom about "the singularity" - when machines become smarter than humans - have attracted millions of dollars and spawned a multitude of conferences. But this hand-wringing is a distraction from the very real problems with artificial intelligence today, which may already be exacerbating inequality in the workplace, at home and in our legal and judicial systems. Sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination are being built into the machine-learning algorithms that underlie the technology behind many "intelligent" systems that shape how we are categorised and advertised to. Take a small example from last year: Users discovered that Google's photo app, which applies automatic labels to pictures in digital photo albums, was classifying images of black people as gorillas. Google apologised; it was unintentional. But similar errors have emerged in Nikon's camera software, which misread images of Asian people as blinking, and in Hewlett-Packard's Web camera software, which had difficulty recognising people with dark skin tones.

Cannes Lions this year saw the ad industry expanding its creative capabilities. Over 13,500 delegates from about 90 countries descended on Cannes again this year hoping for a Lion in one of 17 categories. With awards honoring work from design to creative data to radio, the ceremonies reflected a complex industry drawing on a broader range of creative disciplines than in the past, but also facing unprecedented challenges in making campaigns work across channels. "There's never been so many channels or points of interactions, or agencies working on various parts of that," said Keith Weed, chief marketing and communications officer at Unilever. "It's important to make sure the brand experience does not get fragmented."

Echobox, a London-based AI startup targeting the publishing industry, has secured 3.4 million from Mangrove Capital Partners and LocalGlobe. The startup's AI service is used by publishers to enhance their reach and distribution on social media. The startup claims its tech can predict if an article will go viral and when the optimal time to publish content is. Axel Springer and Le Monde are among its clients. "Having worked at a well-known publisher, I was amazed by how they were investing vast resources in trying to perfect the science of content distribution in-house with data scientists and analytics tools to guide decision-making," said Echobox CEO Antoine Amann.

Artificial intelligence is being used all around us and in the automotive market especially. Companies are fighting it out to develop the next revolutionary product featured around autonomous driving. This is already becoming apparent with the rise in the number of artificial intelligence (A.I) devices being used throughout various industries. The IHS, who are a company specializing in producing reports and statistics, have been conducting reports based upon this field, and the numbers are quite staggering. They have projected that the use of A.I based systems will rocket from 7 million (2015 figure) to 122 million by 2025, with over 100% (some cars will have multiple A.I devices) of them being installed in new vehicles.

While everyone's eyes were on the Brexit vote and staggering economic implications this week, my mind was drifting to another crucial development within the EU. A draft European Parliament motion was recently put forward to begin to classify robots as "electronic persons." In a response to the proliferation of robotics and AI in the workplace, policy makers are attempting to stay ahead of the curve and preempt challenges they foresee around bureaucratic issues such as taxation and legal liability. As corporations rely more and more on automation and less and less on human workers, a new taxation structure will be required to ensure that governments still have funding flowing into their coffers. Moreover, as robotics become more sophisticated and we hand them increasingly critical tasks, issues around actor liability and insurance become very complicated.

Google and Tesla agree autonomous vehicles will make streets safer, and both are racing toward a driverless future. But when Google tested its self-driving car prototype on employees a few years ago, it noticed something that would take it down a different path from Tesla. Once behind the wheel of the modified Lexus SUVs, the drivers quickly started rummaging through their bags, fiddling with their phones and taking their hands off the wheel -- all while traveling on a freeway at 60 mph. "Within about five minutes, everybody thought the car worked well, and after that, they just trusted it to work," Chris Urmson, the head of Google's self-driving car program, said on a panel this year. "It got to the point where people were doing ridiculous things in the car."

In 2010, a startling rumor filtered through the number theory community and reached Jared Weinstein. Apparently, some graduate student at the University of Bonn in Germany had written a paper that redid "Harris-Taylor"--a 288-page book dedicated to a single impenetrable proof in number theory--in only 37 pages. The 22-year-old student, Peter Scholze, had found a way to sidestep one of the most complicated parts of the proof, which deals with a sweeping connection between number theory and geometry. "It was just so stunning for someone so young to have done something so revolutionary," said Weinstein, a 34-year-old number theorist now at Boston University. Mathematicians at the University of Bonn, who made Scholze a full professor just two years later, were already aware of his extraordinary mathematical mind.

Prateek Joshi is an Artificial Intelligence researcher and a published author. He has over eight years of experience in this field with a primary focus on content-based analysis and deep learning. He has written two books on Computer Vision and Machine Learning. His work in this field has resulted in multiple patents, tech demos, and research papers at major IEEE conferences. People from all over the world visit his blog, and he has received more than a million page views from over 200 countries.