A new 300-page research report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Robot Revolution – Global Robot & AI Primer, and to a lesser extent BSG's report: Man and Machine in Industry 4.0, make for interesting reading and highlight the role of AI and the changing nature of jobs and work in the exponential growth of the robotics industry. "We are facing a paradigm shift which will change the way we live and work," the authors of the BoA ML report said. "The pace of disruptive technological innovation has gone from linear to parabolic in recent years. Penetration of robots and artificial intelligence has hit every industry sector, and has become an integral part of our daily lives." BoA ML report projects that the total global market for robots and artificial intelligence will reach 152.7 billion by 2020, and estimates that the adoption of these technologies could improve productivity by 30% in some industries.

The following is an edited, updated version of an article originally written for IEEE Spectrum. I'm 62, with all that entails. I still play a mean game of hockey, but entropy looms ever larger. So part of me wants very much to believe that we are rapidly approaching "The Singularity." Like heaven, the Singularity comes in many versions, but most involve bionic brain boosting.

New lip-reading technology developed at the University of East Anglia could help in solving crimes and provide communication assistance for people with hearing and speech impairments. The visual speech recognition technology, created by Helen L. Bear, PhD, and Prof Richard Harvey of UEA's School of Computing Sciences, can be applied "any place where the audio isn't good enough to determine what people are saying," Bear said. Those include criminal investigations, entertainment, and especially where are there are high levels of noise, such as in cars or aircraft cockpits, she said. Bear said unique problems with determining speech arise when sound isn't available -- such as on video footage -- or if the audio is inadequate and there aren't clues to give the context of a conversation. The sounds '/p/,' '/b/,' and '/m/' all look similar on the lips, but now the machine lip-reading classification technology can differentiate between the sounds for a more accurate translation.

Sometimes, the field of artificial intelligence looks pretty ridiculous, like when Microsoft's teen chatbot was tricked by online trolls to say racist and sexist things. Consider how it's affecting our working world. Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO of computer graphics hardware company Nvidia, can see this clearly. For a long time, gamers have loved Nvidia for the company's graphics processors (GPUs) that have the ability to gorgeously render insanely violent games. Here's the twist: Nvidia's GPUs also happen to be excellent for deep learning, an AI technique that allows algorithms to recognize patterns and become more adept at finding them over time.

A company that helps users to create their own websites now knows what kind of sites their 80 million users are building without pestering them with repeated questions. Wix, a Tel Aviv-based Web development company, is using machine learning on Google's cloud platform to learn more about its users so it can help them find the images they need to build interesting and useful websites. That's just the beginning of how machine learning will be used in the cloud, according to industry analysts who say machine learning will be the biggest thing that's ever hit the cloud. David Zuckerman, head of developer experience for Wix, said machine learning in the cloud will be a boon to companies that don't have a major research division. "The cloud has brought this technology to everyone," he said.

The MIT Technology Review team is hard at work on our popular EmTech conference series for 2016. This May, our fourth annual EmTech Digital program will explore the growing implications of artificial intelligence on our connected environments at home, at work, and on the go. AI already plays an active role in our day-to-day lives. Intelligent systems power search, social media, and your smartphone and track your health and finances. At EmTech Digital, our program will explore how AI technologies are already transforming industries globally, as well as what we can expect to experience in the next wave of innovation.

Tay inexplicably added the "repeat after me" phrase to the parroted content on at least some tweets, implying that users should repeat what the chatbot said.Quickly realizing its teenage bot had been radicalized into a genocidal, Nazi-loving, Donald Trump supporter, Microsoft shut Tay down. According to Tay's "about" page linked to the Twitter profile, "Tay is an artificial intelligent chat bot developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams to experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding". Unfortunately, Microsoft continues, within the first 24 hours of coming online, they became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have it respond in inappropriate ways. Apple Temporarily Pulls iOS 9.3 Update for Older iOS Devices It will then click on "All my devices" and select the device before clicking "Delete Account" and restart the terminal again. The video below (and its comments) will give you some idea about what to expect if you're coming from iOS 8 to iOS 9.3.

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Meet Atlas, designed by Boston Dynamics, funded by DARPA. You buy your kid a new toy, and a few weeks later, you find it tossed into a corner, forgotten and unloved. Well, something similar just happened at Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) -- although it took years, rather than weeks, to happen. Three years after buying itself probably the coolest robot company on Earth, Google has gotten bored -- and is selling Boston Dynamics. History is awesome Struck by the potential for building robots, and outfitting them with artificial intelligence, Google spent much of 2013 running around, frantically buying up robotics companies.

Microsoft issued an apology for the offensive things its artificial intelligence chatbot Tay said on Twitter. As reported Microsoft had to shutdown Tay because of offensive and racist Tweets uttered by Tay. Microsoft says in the statement that they tried to prevent this behavior through filters and stress-testing. Although Microsoft had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, the researched had made a critical oversight for this specific attack. Earlier reports depicted Tay as holding a mirror in front of all Twitter users, which resulted in Tay's behavior. It was a coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay.