How did you like that three-pack of tank tops you bought last time you were in?" Chief of PreCrime John Anderton is running from the law for a crime he has not committed yet. After a risky eye transplant in order to avoid the city-wide optical recognition system, he enters into a mall where his borrowed identity is immediately recognized and commercial adds and offers pop up on digital billboards based on his personal taste and past purchases. The reality is that we don't have to wait until 2054 for this legendary scene from the 2002 movie Minority Report to happen. Fortunately, we don't register people with optical recognition (yet!), but we can already track and identify individuals' position using the mobile phones we all carry -- and from that information make personalized offers. These are just a few examples of the many technologies available today.

CANNES: Planners need to embrace emerging data opportunities such as artificial intelligence (AI), but must also stick to tried and true research techniques, and consider the ever-present need to prove their value to clients, Warc's 2016 'Future of Strategy' debate has suggested. The panel session at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity included Sandy Thompson, global planning director at Y&R, Chris Stephenson, APAC head of strategy at PHD Singapore, and Debbie Weinstein, managing director of brand solutions and innovation at Google. It was moderated by Adam Ferrier, the global CSO of Cummins&Partners. "There are a lot more analytics and statistics involved in strategy," said Weinstein. "In the future, it might be robots and AI, [though] right now it's a data scientist looking at the data."

British physicist Stephen Hawking says the potential threat from artificial intelligence isn't just a far-off "Terminator"-style nightmare. He's already pointing to signs that AI is going down the wrong track. "Governments seem to be engaged in an AI arms race, designing planes and weapons with intelligent technologies," Hawking told veteran interviewer Larry King. "The funding for projects directly beneficial to the human race, such as improved medical screening, seems a somewhat lower priority." It's not surprising that Hawking is worried about AI – he's been issuing warning for years.

Keep calm and carry on; artificial intelligence will not take all our jobs and achieve world domination, according to a report released by Forrester. Prominent figures including Elon Musk, co-chairman of OpenAI, and Professor Stephen Hawking have publicly warned people about how the advent of AI will cause an existential threat to humankind. The frenzy around AI has led to groups rallying for future safety measures. Google's DeepMind has even collaborated with Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute to develop [PDF] an AI "panic button." Forrester, a technological research and advisory firm, believes the panic is exaggerated, however, and said: "Don't believe the hype – Google AlphaGo's gaming successes and IBM Watson will not usher in a dystopian triumph of machines over humans."

By Max Chafkin Y Combinator, the startup accelerator and investment firm that helped produce Airbnb, Dropbox, and Instacart, is embarking on a creation project arguably more ambitious than any company. "We want to build cities," wrote Y Combinator partner Adora Cheung and President Sam Altman in an announcement slated for release Monday. YC Research, Y Combinator's nonprofit arm, plans to solicit proposals for research into new construction methods, power sources, driverless cars, even notions of zoning and property rights. Among other things, the project aims to develop ways to reduce housing expenses by 90 percent and to develop a city code of laws simple enough to fit on 100 pages of text. Eventually the plan is to actually produce a prototype city.

Challenger banks have turned their attention to artificial intelligence (AI) as they seek to provide a more personalised approach to banking. German digital bank Number26 has launched Pulse26, a new app that uses AI to provide updates based on the customer's personal banking history. Number26 says the more a customer uses their account, the "more accurate" the analysis becomes. It adds that Pulse26 will also provide "periodic, fun insights". The firm says: "In the first weeks after launching this feature we will start with your favourite spot – the restaurant that you visited most and where you used your Number26 card."

In 1942, Russian science fiction writer Isaac Asimov drew up his'Three Laws of Robotics': 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. For 75 years, these clauses have inspired research and thinking on robot rights. They were even taken up in the first'Ethics Charter for Robots' drawn up by South Korea in 2007. However, today Asimov's laws seem rather simplistic and obsolete as they are centred on humans rather than robots. Nowadays ethics and the rights of machines are starting to go further.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gathering pace as one of the biggest ICT trends of our time – and the topic of "robot journalism" provides important insight on how AI is being applied to industry. How is natural language generation (NLG) being used to explain big data in narrative form that broader audiences can easily understand? What insights are being found by machines producing 2,000 articles per second? How are some of the world's biggest media agencies currently using vendors that provide these solutions to build their reach, engagement, and businesses? Will "robots" (or automated content) soon render journalists obsolete?

As we've mentioned, corporate giants in tech are competing to acquire private artificial intelligence startups, with Google emerging as the most active acquirer over the last 5 years. So far in 2016, there have already been over 20 acquisitions of AI startups, the most recent being Twitter's acquisition of visual-processing startup Magic Pony Technology. We analyzed M&A and IPO activity in this space from 2011. Our artificial intelligence category includes companies developing core AI algorithms as well as those applying AI solutions to specific industries like healthcare and cybersecurity. We used our database to analyze at what stage the AI companies exited.

Fahad Aziz is the Co-founder of Caremerge, an "award-winning technology company revolutionizing communication and coordination of care for seniors." As an industry leader in the tech space, Aziz has his finger on the pulse of disruptive healthcare tech. He says a few technologies are poised to seriously upend'business as usual' in healthcare in the near future, and they are not necessarily what you'd expect. In 2012, Vinod Khosla predicted that in time, "technology will replace 80% of what doctors do." He is spot on, according to Aziz.