Just how worried should we be about killer robots? To go by the opinions of a highly regarded group of scholars, including Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, Franz Wilczek, and Stuart Russell, we should be wary of the prospect of artificial intelligence rebelling against its makers. "One can imagine (AI) outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand," Hawking wrote in a 2014 article for The Independent. "Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all." The fear that our irresponsible creations might bring about the end of humanity is a common one.

As fast-food workers across the country vie for 15 per hour wages, many business owners have already begun to take humans out of the picture. "I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday and if you look at the robotic devices that are coming into the restaurant industry -- it's cheaper to buy a 35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who's inefficient making 15 an hour bagging French fries -- it's nonsense and it's very destructive and it's inflationary and it's going to cause a job loss across this country like you're not going to believe," said former McDonald's (MCD) USA CEO Ed Rensi during an interview on the FOX Business Network's Mornings with Maria. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.3 million people earned the current minimum wage of 7.25 per hour with about 1.7 million having wages below the federal minimum in 2014. These three million workers combined made up 3.9 percent of all hourly paid workers. "It's not just going to be in the fast food business. Franchising is the best business model in the United States. It's dependent on people that have low job skills that have to grow. Well if you can't get people a reasonable wage, you're going to get machines to do the work. It's going to happen whether you like it or not. And the more you push this it's going to happen faster," Rensi added.

A company claims it can identify terrorists, paedophiles and ace poker players simply by looking at their face. Faception, an Israeli start-up, says its technology can spot character traits that are undetectable to the naked eye. The company claims its software classified nine of the 11 Paris massacre jihadists as terrorists from their facial features without inputting any prior knowledge of their involvement. It appears to have been so successful, the firm says it is now working with a homeland security agency to help identify criminals. Shai Gilboa, Faception chief executive, said: 'We understand the human much better than other humans understand each other.

Getting stuck in a traffic jam can be one of the most frustrating parts of travelling around a busy city. Now engineers in China, the world's most populated country, have come up with a way to overcome the problem of getting around in traffic. Designs for a new elevated bus has been unveiled at a tech expo in China, which will apparently be able to carry 1,200 passengers over the top of cars and let traffic to pass underneath it. A model of a new elevated bus (pictured) has been unveiled at a tech expo in China, which will allegedly carry over 1,000 passengers over the top of cars, to allow traffic to pass underneath it. The scale model of the'Transit Elevated Bus' was demonstrated this week at the 19th China Beijing International High-Tech Expo.

An autonomous vehicle startup backed by Ford Motor Co. F 1.22 % Chairman Bill Ford raised 16 million in additional funding with an eye on launching autonomous taxis in Singapore this autumn. One of the leading developers of self-driving technology, Cambridge, Mass.-based nuTonomy is racing heavyweights--including Uber Technologies Inc., General Motors Co. GM 1.14 % and Alphabet Inc. GOOGL 1.96 % --to further testing of autonomous cars on public roads. The company was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2013, and counts Highland Capital Partners LLC and Singapore's economic development arm among its investors. In January, it raised 3.6 million from a group of investors that included Mr. Ford's venture-capital firm, Fontinalis Partners. NuTonomy Chief Executive Karl Iagnemma said the latest round is "going to let us accelerate our progress--more people and more cars."

Deep learning is a topic that is making big waves at the moment. It is basically a branch of machine learning (another hot topic) that uses algorithms to e.g. Scientists have used deep learning algorithms with multiple processing layers (hence "deep") to make better models from large quantities of unlabeled data (such as photos with no description, voice recordings or videos on YouTube). It's one kind of supervised machine learning, in which a computer is provided a training set of examples to learn a function, where each example is a pair of an input and an output from the function. Very simply: if we give the computer a picture of a cat and a picture of a ball, and show it which one is the cat, we can then ask it to decide if subsequent pictures are cats.

By 2018, China shall build platforms for fundamental AI resources and innovation and make breakthroughs on basic core technology, said the three-year implementation program for "Internet Plus" artificial intelligence. The plan is formulated jointly by the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Cyberspace Administration of China. According to the website, the country shall be in line with global AI technology and industries by 2018. At key regions, the country will cultivate some global leading AI enterprises and set up an innovative, open, cooperative, green and safe AI industrial ecology. The country will cultivate and develop emerging artificial intelligence industries, promote innovation in intelligent products and enhance the intelligence level of terminal products.

Just as electricity transformed everything we do, artificial intelligence -- think really, really smart machines -- will upend industries from retail to finance to transportation. And that will reshape our world and change our lives, said a panel of experts Monday discussing "The State of AI" at the EmTech Digital Conference in San Francisco. The transformation, though, will rest on humbler underpinnings. In much the same way that all companies learned to make use of the Internet, they'll start to adapt to AI by expanding their data teams. Three of the biggest experts in artificial intelligence, Andrew Ng, Peter Norvig and Oren Etzioni, say despite its recent boom, AI still has a long way to go.

Pakistan's Interior Minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, says authorities will perform DNA tests on the body of a man who was killed in an American drone strike to determine whether the slain man is actually Taliban chief Mullah Mohammed Akhtar Mansour.

As of this moment, there are more than 2 trillion posts on Facebook--a figure that expands by a billion each day. Perhaps best known as the guy who introduced Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Bill Fernandez speaks out on Apple's founding magic, how love built the first Mac, and the interface of the future. The beauty of the internet, Packer said on Monday at EmTechDIGITAL 2016 in San Francisco, is that we now have "access to almost all the knowledge in world, from almost anywhere in the world." The "proliferation of languages and cultures on the internet," however, has created a unique problem: "There's a disconnect between the languages people speak and the content they want to access," he said. So, Facebook is using machine learning to grapple with issues like natural language understanding, translation, and interpreting slang.