Google's billionaire executive chairman Eric Schmidt says he's seen the future of wealth creation from the IT industry, and its name is "machine learning." "This is the next transformation," Schmidt said during a keynote speech during Google's Cloud Computing Platform tech conference on Wednesday in San Francisco. "I'm a programmer who sort of got lucky at Google," he continued. "But the programming paradigm is changing. Instead of programming a computer, you teach a computer to learn something and it does what you want."

In the October5, 2015 issue of the Wall Street Journal, there appeared a feature article titled: "Scientists Tap Dragonfly Vision to Build a Better Bionic Eye", with the subtitle: "Artificial-intelligence system could aid the blind and help create a better driverless car." The actual article was written by Rachel Pannett and starts as follows: "What can humans learn from dragonflies? Australian researchers have developed an artificial-intelligence system based on a dragonfly's vision that they say could help improve the eyesight of people who can see almost nothing. The system also is expected to find applications in automated technologies that rely on artificial sight, such as robots and driverless cars." In this article, the dragonfly's remarkable ability as a predator is mentioned.

It was hard to tell whether hope or fear was the predominant sentiment about the future of artificial intelligence, according to a panel discussing the state of the field at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Wednesday. A.I. systems are rapidly becoming more capable, the panel -- which included Ya-Qin Zhang, president of Chinese search engine company Baidu Inc., and Matthew Grob, the chief technology officer at Qualcomm Inc. -- agreed: they're able to learn from analyzing large data sets and they can increasingly discern human emotions by monitoring facial expressions and natural language. A.I. researchers Andrew Moore, the dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, were also on the panel and concurred that as a result, A.I. is likely to vastly improve human lives in the coming decade. But the researchers and executives voiced concern about possible downsides ranging from economic displacement to computers that escape the ability of humans to control them with potentially dire consequences. Using A.I. to improve search engine results has the potential to transform search from a 1 trillion industry today to a 10 trillion industry, Russell said.

PORTLAND, OREGON – The U.S. military on Thursday christened an experimental self-driving warship designed to hunt for enemy submarines, a major advance in robotic warfare at the core of America's strategy to counter Chinese and Russian naval investments. The 132-foot-long (40-meter-long) unarmed prototype, dubbed Sea Hunter, is the naval equivalent of Google's self-driving car, designed to cruise on the ocean's surface for two or three months at a time -- without a crew or anyone controlling it remotely. That kind of endurance and autonomy could make it a highly efficient submarine stalker at a fraction of the cost of the Navy's manned vessels. "This is an inflection point," Deputy U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Work said in an interview, adding he hoped such ships might find a place in the Western Pacific in as few as five years. "This is the first time we've ever had a totally robotic, trans-oceanic-capable ship."

Until recently, Robyn Ewing was a writer in Hollywood, developing TV scripts and pitching pilots to film studios. Now she's applying her creative talents toward building the personality of a different type of character -- a virtual assistant, animated by artifical intelligence, that interacts with sick patients. Ewing works with engineers on the software program, called Sophie, which can be downloaded to a smartphone. The virtual nurse gently reminds users to check their medication, asks them how they are feeling or if they are in pain, and then sends the data to a real doctor. As tech behemoths and a wave of start-ups double down on virtual assistants that can chat with human beings, writing for AI is becoming a hot job in Silicon Valley.

We have long deemed ourselves to be at the pinnacle of cognitive abilities among animals. But that is different from being at the pinnacle of evolution in a number of very important ways. As Mark Twain pointed out in 1903, to presume that evolution has been a long path leading to humans as its crowning achievement is just as preposterous as presuming that the whole purpose of building the Eiffel Tower was to put that final coat of paint on its tip. Moreover, evolution is not synonymous with progress, but simply change over time. And humans aren't even the youngest, most recently evolved species.

The honeycombs in which they store their amber nectar are marvels of precision engineering, an array of prism-shaped cells with a perfectly hexagonal cross-section. The wax walls are made with a very precise thickness, the cells are gently tilted from the horizontal to prevent the viscous honey from running out, and the entire comb is aligned with the Earth's magnetic field. Yet this structure is made without any blueprint or foresight, by many bees working simultaneously and somehow coordinating their efforts to avoid mismatched cells. The ancient Greek philosopher Pappus of Alexandria thought that the bees must be endowed with "a certain geometrical forethought." And who could have given them this wisdom, but God?

State and local police began using facial recognition in the early 2000s. The early systems were notoriously unreliable, but today law-enforcement agencies in Chicago, Dallas, West Virginia, and elsewhere have acquired or are actively considering more sophisticated surveillance camera systems. Some of these systems can capture the faces of passersby and identify them in real-time. Sheriff's departments across Florida and Southern California have been outfitted with smartphone or tablet facial recognition systems that can be used to run drivers and pedestrians against mug shot databases. In fact, Florida and several other states enroll every driver's license photo in their facial recognition databases. Now, with the click of a button, many police departments can identify a suspect caught committing a crime on camera, verify the identity of a driver who does not produce a license, or search a state driver's license database for suspected fugitives.

Social networks are awash with information. Relief agencies such the Kenyan chapter of the Red Cross are already leveraging information from Twitter to track and respond to emergencies. The innumerable amount of information generated within a crisis requires faster processing to extract actionable information. At iHub Research, we studied the flow of information on social media during the March 2013 Kenyan general election and developed a framework looking at the '3Vs of crowdsourcing,' a functional approach to validating, verifying and checking viability of crowdsourced information. As part of the research, machine learning techniques were deployed to sift through 2.6 million tweets and remove non-pertinent data, which narrowed down to 12,000 useful tweets.

I'm currently looking at computer science degrees (in the UK), and have found myself particularly drawn to computer science and artificial intelligence courses, any books you'd recommend to read to help me gauge if this is something I'd like to spend the next few years studying?