A convoy of nearly a dozen self-driving trucks has arrived safely in Rotterdam following a cross-border European test run, in one of the first major steps towards future automated trucking. The self-driving truck convoy was part of one of the largest convoys of these semi-automated trucks being tested by a consortium of some of the largest European truck producers, including DAF, Daimler, Iveco, MAN, Scania and Volvo. According to The Guardian, the truck convoy arrived in what are being called'truck platoons', which consist of groupings of between two and three trucks. Within the truck platoon, the three individual vehicles were connected via a wireless signal, with one truck leading and the others following suit in terms of the route the lead is taking, as well as speed. President of the group representing the manufacturers, Eric Jonnaert, said that the concept of truck platoons for self-driving trucks driving at the same speed would have a considerable benefit in terms of reducing traffic on motorways.

While companies such as Google chase the fully autonomous car, Toyota is taking a more measured approach toward a "guardian angel" car that would seize control only when an accident is imminent. But as starkly different as those approaches are, they both will require a wide range of data-intensive technologies, according to Gill Pratt (pictured), chief executive officer of the Toyota Research Institute, a research center focused on AI and robotics. He spoke at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose today. Toyota has made a huge bet–a billion dollars over five years, in fact–not only on semiautonomous cars but robots that could help older people with indoor mobility. The Toyota Research Institute, which will have facilities near Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is intended to focus both on what Toyota calls outdoor mobility (cars) as well as indoor mobility (robots).

Make room, stethoscope and otoscope. Artificial intelligence (AI) applications are increasingly among the physician's standard instruments,experts at the University of Toronto say. "With electronic records, you can use text algorithms to read a patient's history, review their genetic predispositions, and correlate the information to make predictions," says Dr. Frank Rudzicz. Rudicz is one of five experts exploring the issues of privacy, accuracy and accountability at The Robot Will See You Now – the Revolution in Artificial Intelligence and Medicine at U of T on April 5. A research scientist with the Toronto Rehab Institute and an assistant professor (status only) in the department of computer science at the University of Toronto, Rudzicz is also a project lead within a federally funded national research network in technology and aging known as AGE-WELL NCE.

Workers looking for jobs in 2035 might consider retraining as remote-controlled vehicle operators or online chaperones. Those are two of the jobs of the future suggested in a report by the CSIRO that charts 20-year trends in increasingly digitally focused and automated Australian workplaces. Related: Automation may mean a post-work society but we shouldn't be afraid The employment minister, Michaelia Cash, released the report on Friday at the Australian Computer Society's conference. Cash said the report showed "some jobs will inevitably become automated over the coming years but technological change will improve others and also create new jobs and opportunities". "The future won't be about people competing with machines, it will be about people using machines and doing work that is more interesting and fulfilling," she said.

Google self-driving car finally causes an accident - a lesson in AI. According to The Verge, Google had recently performed a software update that changed the behavior to be more human like. "So several weeks ago we began giving the self-driving car the capabilities it needs to do what human drivers do: hug the rightmost side of the lane." The truth is that one of the complaints about self-driving cars is that they are too cautious so Google adapted the software so the car would move to the far right of the lane so two cars could fit in the single wide lane. This is what a regular, old fashioned, human being does so cars can move more fluidly though the heavily congested streets of California.

Are bots the new apps? Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella reckons they are. Bots sometimes get a bad rap, but here are a few that will brighten your feeds. This week, Kik – a messaging app popular with teenagers – launched a "Bot Shop" where users can interact with brands or play games with chat bots instead of talking to their real friends. American Tex-Mex chain Taco Bell launched the TacoBot, which lets you order lunch directly from Slack, a work chat platform.

Bots sometimes get a bad rap, but here are a few that will brighten your feeds. Are bots the new apps? Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella reckons they are. This week, Kik – a messaging app popular with teenagers – launched a "Bot Shop" where users can interact with brands or play games with chat bots instead of talking to their real friends.

Jeffrey Hawkins is the American founder of Palm Computing (where he invented the Palm Pilot) and Handspring (where he invented the Treo). He has since turned to work on neuroscience full-time, founded the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience (formerly the Redwood Neuroscience Institute) in 2002, founded Numenta in 2005 and published On Intelligence describing his memory-prediction framework theory of the brain. In 2003 he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering "for the creation of the hand-held computing paradigm and the creation of the first commercially successful example of a hand-held computing device." Hawkins also serves on the Advisory Board of the Secular Coalition for America and offers advice to the coalition on the acceptance and inclusion of nontheism in American life. Andrew Yan-Tak Ng is Chief Scientist at Baidu Research in Silicon Valley.

Computing giant Nvidia has announced the world's first "supercomputer in a box" – the DGX-1. With a cool 170 teraflops of performance, the machine is designed to tackle the complex worlds of deep learning and artificial intelligence, areas of research requiring massive amounts of computing power. The DGX-1 uses the company's newly developed Pascal architecture that recently showed up in its beastly in-car supercomputer. The DGX-1 has eight Tesla GP100 GPUs, each with 16 gigabytes of memory. Alongside that, the knowledge hungry supercomputer contains 512 GB of RAM, and four 1.92 terabyte solid state hard drives.

Google's job since inception has been to make everyone's lives easier, from everyday consumers to business people. At the NEXT Google Cloud Platform user conference in San Francisco, Google's officials announced they're taking it a step further by offering limited access to a new machine-learning platform that everyone can use. The service they're offering is used by Google Photos, Translate, and Inbox to collect data and streamline processes in business. It's supposed to make it easier for developers to use the power of Big Data and machine learning to power other features offered by Google, including the ability to identify images inside apps, recognize commands spoken into Android Phones, and collect data to improve the user experience online. "Major Google applications use Cloud Machine Learning, including Photos (image search), the Google app (voice search), Translate and Inbox (Smart Reply)," the company says in the official announcement.