IBM Watson is probably still best known for crushing it on Jeopardy. Now the same artificial intelligence software is being used for a new fleet of self-driving buses currently roaming the streets of Washington, D.C. Developed by Local Motors, Olli is an electric, 3D printed transportation pod. It can carry up to 12 people and travel about 30 miles per charge at a speed of up t0 12 miles per hour. It uses a technology similar to Google's self-driving cars to scan the environment and get around, but the company says there's also a human monitoring Olli remotely just in case something goes wrong What really makes Olli special is the way it integrates IBM Watson. Instead of typing out your destination you can simply say "Olli, take me downtown."

Lam Wing Kee, 61, a Hong Kong bookseller who was imprisoned in China has told the BBC he considered taking his own life while in custody. Mr Lam was one of five booksellers targeted by officials for selling material critical of the Chinese leadership. Speaking to the BBC's Juliana Liu, he said: "You can stand up against tyranny."

It is an issue troubling some of the greatest minds in the world at the moment, from Professor Stephen Hawking to Bill Gates and Elon Musk. So it is perhaps not surprising there are now growing fears among the public about the threat posed by artificial intelligence. A new survey has revealed that one in three people now believe the rise of AI computing will pose a serious threat to humanity within the next century. There are mounting fears among the public about the threat posed by artificial intelligence. A new survey has revealed that one in three people now believe the rise of AI computing will pose a serious threat to humanity.

It was a dark, overcast day, with clouds hovering low. The room was kept at the most appropriate temperatures and humidity, as usual. Yoko sat on a couch in an untidy manner, killing time with a silly game. But she would not talk to me. So begins a short story titled "A day when a computer writes fiction."

The idea of superintelligent machines may sound like the plot of "The Terminator" or "The Matrix," but many experts say the idea isn't far-fetched. Some even think the singularity -- the point at which artificial intelligence can match, and then overtake, human smarts -- might happen in just 16 years. But nearly every computer scientist will have a different prediction for when and how the singularity will happen. Some believe in a utopian future, in which humans can transcend their physical limitations with the aid of machines. But others think humans will eventually relinquish most of their abilities and gradually become absorbed into artificial intelligence (AI)-based organisms, much like the energy making machinery in our own cells.

Artificial intelligence is one of the most debated technologies in the world today. Whether it be the obvious advantages of having a computer that can learn or the ramifications of a device that can fight back against its creator, there is no limit to the concerns when it comes to this revolutionary tech upgrade. Fortunately, scientists are developing something that will put your mind at ease when it comes to robots taking over the world. DeepMind is Google's artificial intelligence division, and they are the ones heading the charge to guarantee the technology revolution is limited to self-driving cars. They have joined forces with Oxford University to develop a "kill switch" that will prevent artificial intelligence from learning too much.

Tim Cook's Apple put artificial intelligence at the centre of major updates to its iPhone and iPad operating system. Craig Federighi called the update to the operating system the "biggest iOS release ever for our users". One of the biggest themes was artificial intelligence. The Photos app is being updated to scan photos and provide users with more context. Using deep learning the photos app will now scan objects and scenes of photos to build a profile of them and provide images that could be used in the same context.

In the past few years we've seen software giants like Alphabet's Google and Amazon.com Google began as a search bar but now plays in the mobile (Android), media (YouTube), hardware (Motorola), transportation (Waze) and IoT (Nest) spaces as well. Likewise, Amazon.com was originally a site to sell books online, but now sells every product under the sun and operates the world's largest public cloud through Amazon Web Services (AWS). In addition to the behemoths who have aggressively expanded in the past decade, we've witnessed new players barrel in and disrupt additional industries. Airbnb is now valued at 20 Billion – more than every hospitality company in the world except Hilton and Marriott, despite owning no hotels.

We have been hearing predictions for decades of a takeover of the world by artificial intelligence. In 1957, Herbert A. Simon predicted that within 10 years a digital computer would be the world's chess champion. That didn't happen until 1996. And despite Marvin Minsky's 1970 prediction that "in from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being," we still consider that a feat of science fiction. The pioneers of artificial intelligence were surely off on the timing, but they weren't wrong; AI is coming.

The father of modern speech recognition, Frederick Jelinek, once famously said: 'Anytime a linguist leaves the group, the recognition rate goes up.' Based on this logic, if the domain experts – the phonologists, in his case – were to be exchanged with pure engineers, the performance of the system would improve. Would this theory apply to a system that heavily utilises machine learning? Do the domain experts increase the performance, or is it the lack of them that is best for the system? When working in a highly specialised domain, such as the legal arena, which has clear, well-defined tasks, technology is provided to support, augment and increase productivity. It is often the case that both supervised machine learning techniques (i.e.