Artificial intelligence might be coming to asset management faster than you think. Also this week, we discuss marketplace lending, AirBnb as a "credit bureau," an electricity trade via the blockchain and one start-up's approach to selling data to Wall Street. "Eventually the time will come that no human investment manager will be able to beat the computer." These words were uttered last year by David Siegel, co-head of Two Sigma Investments, the 30 billion quant fund that returned 15% in its two flagship vehicles last year. This week, we were reminded of Siegel's prediction upon meeting with a technologist who was still mesmerized by AlphaGo, Google's artificial intelligence Go program that handily defeated Go master, Lee Sedol, last month.

"We (human beings) began as animals, gradually transformed ourselves into the gods of the planet earth, and very soon we may pass this mastery to a complete different lifeform, artificial intelligence (AI) and even disappear completely," said Yuval Harari, author of an international bestseller, in Beijing on April 23. The Israeli historian began this argument while citing the historic five-game match between World Go Champion Lee Sedol and AlphaGo, Google's computer program, which brought worldwide attention to the power of artificial intelligence. He forecasted that we may witness AI's emergence and domination in the decades to come. "It (AlphaGo) has no conscious or feelings; when it played, it did not feel anxious and while it won, it did not feel joy," said Dr. Harari who is frightened by a situation in which intelligence and consciousness may separate with AI conquering the world. He cited driving as an example, saying that as companies like Google and Tesla all developing AI that can outperform humans in operating vehicles, people may finally free themselves from these actions as the computer programs drive more efficiently, safely and cheaply in a highly-connected system of artificial intelligence that renders accidents and traffic jams a thing of the past.

Intellectual Ventures Laboratory has built a new microscope equipped with artificial intelligence to accurately detect malaria from blood samples. The results of their study were published in IEEE Explore. IVL is the research facility of Intellectual Ventures located in Seattle, which is owned by Charles Delahunt. The development of this new microscope was funded by Bill and Melinda Gates as part of the Global Good Fund. The new microscope is called Autoscope.

HANOVER, GERMANY – President Barack Obama delivered a strong defense of international trade deals Sunday in the face of domestic and foreign opposition, saying it's "indisputable" that such agreements strengthen the economy and make U.S. businesses more competitive worldwide. Obama, on a farewell visit to Germany as president, is trying to counter public skepticism about a trans-Atlantic trade deal with Europe, while also facing down criticism from the 2016 presidential candidates of a pending Asia-Pacific trade pact. Despite all that, Obama said: "the majority of people still favor trade. They still recognize, on balance, that it's a good idea. "It is indisputable that it has made our economy stronger," Obama said about international trade. He said he was confident the trans-Atlantic trade deal could be completed by the end of year, to be presented for ratification.

You may have heard the news lately from Guangzhou, China about the firing of robots as waitstaff. Out of three restaurants that used robots to serve customers, two have closed and the third fired its robot workers. The robots couldn't effectively handle soup dishes, often malfunctioned, and had to follow a fixed route that sometimes resulted in clashes. A customer also claimed that robots were unable to do tasks such as topping up water or placing a dish on the table. "The robots weren't able to carry soup or other food steady and they would frequently break down. The boss has decided never to use them again," said one employee.

Small independent video game studios are growing in number and influence at PAX East, the annual videogaming show that's drawing tens of thousands of gamers to Boston's Seaport District. The Indie Megabooth at PAX East, which runs through today at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, features 84 studios this year, up from 16 indie developers with booth space just a few years ago. Indie games are attracting more veterans from large gaming companies, who want to follow their own vision, and the rudimentary graphics and sound often seen in the first indie wave is giving way to titles with striking artwork, music, and top-notch game play. Scott Sinclair, co-founder of Cambridge-based Molasses Flood LLC, was the art director for big game titles "BioShock" and "BioShock Infinite" at Quincy's Irrational Games before launching his own company several years ago. He and five other co-founders raised 251,647 on Kickstarter to fund "The Flame in the Flood," a post-apocalyptic survival game that follows a woman and her dog navigating a flood-swollen river on a raft.

Network television is at risk of getting caught in a vicious cycle. As the audience fragments in a million different directions, smaller subsets of that audience see promos for new shows. Then, as new shows draw smaller crowds, even fewer viewers see promos for other programs. The reach of television networks (the total number of viewers who watch for a minute or more once a day) is down a daunting 12 percent in one year. Yet a six percent larger audience has seen the promos for MTV's Viacom networks--even though they're using fewer spots.

Coursera Statistics, Making Sense of Data: A applied Statistics course that teaches the complete pipeline of statistical analysis MIT: Statistical Thinking and Data Analysis: Introduction to probability, sampling, regression, common distributions, and inference. While R is the de facto standard for performing statistical analysis, it has quite a high learning curve and there are other areas of data science for which it is not well suited. To avoid learning a new language for a specific problem domain, we recommend trying to perform the exercises of these courses with Python and its numerous statistical libraries. You will find that much of the functionality of R can be replicated with NumPy, @SciPy, @Matplotlib, and @Python Data Analysis Library Books Well-written books can be a great reference (and supplement) to these courses, and also provide a more independent learning experience. These may be useful if you already have some knowledge of the subject or just need to fill in some gaps in your understanding: O'Reilly Think Stats: An Introduction to Probability and Statistics for Python programmers Introduction to Probability: Textbook for Berkeley's Stats 134 class, an introductory treatment of probability with complementary exercises.

Softbank's Pepper brings the march of the robots closer to reality with a big step forward. But it also highlights the long road ahead. The popular robot – Softbank sold than 7000 units in 7 months in Japan during 2015 – is arguably the world's leading example of the consumerisation of robotics in action today and should be on any business and IT leader's list of emerging tech to evaluate. Even if Pepper isn't the most advanced in terms of technology, and it isn't by a long stretch, it is supported by the most progressive, ecosystem-based business model. And this latter factor is probably more important to Pepper's future success.

Sébastien Bratières is a PHD candidate in Engineering at the University of Cambridge, where he researches probabilistic machine learning in the Bayesian methods. His background is in natural language processing and speech recognition. Currently he works for Dawin, a company making speech recognition interfaces.