Some things in life cannot be offset by a mere net gain in intelligence. The last few years have seen the widespread recognition that sophisticated AI is under development. Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and others warn of the rise of "superintelligent" machines: AIs that outthink the smartest humans in every domain, including common sense reasoning and social skills. Superintelligence could destroy us, they caution. In contrast, Ray Kurzweil, a Google director of engineering, depicts a technological utopia bringing about the end of disease, poverty and resource scarcity.

In 2012, IBM Watson went to medical school. So said The New York Times, announcing that the tech giant's artificially intelligent question-and-answer machine had begun a "stint as a medical student" at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. This was just a metaphor. Clinicians were helping IBM train Watson for use in medical research. But as metaphors go, it wasn't a very good one.

The predictions that robots and artificial intelligence will soon take over the world may be a little premature. To be sure, the field of artificial intelligence is booming, and the technology is rapidly evolving. As its name implies, AI uses computer learning to handle all manner of basic human tasks, such as decision-making and data analysis. Its potential applications include everything from manufacturing to, yes, even being a CEO, by some estimates. And if you're a startup in artificial intelligence, the time to get funding is now, according to new research from CB Insights, the venture capital research firm. AI companies received 310 million in 54 funding deals in 2015, a seven-fold increase in the last four years.

Courtesy of Oscar SalazarOscar Salazar was a co-founder of Uber. Imagine a world where any child with a smartphone has access to a personal tutor who's familiar with his or her learning style. Where bots recognize the symptoms of a sickness you describe, so a healthcare provider can quickly and efficiently help you get better. And where transportation companies know where and when you need to get somewhere before you even tell them. That's the world Oscar Salazar, a co-founder of Uber and now an independent entrepreneur, is excited about.

It was hailed as the most significant test of machine intelligence since Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess nearly 20 years ago. Google's AlphaGo has won two of the first three games against grandmaster Lee Sedol in a Go tournament, showing the dramatic extent to which AI has improved over the years. That fateful day when machines finally become smarter than humans has never appeared closer--yet we seem no closer in grasping the implications of this epochal event. Late last year, SpaceX co-founder Elon Musk warned that AI could take over the world, sparking a flurry of commentary both in condemnation and support. For such a monumental future event, there's a startling amount of disagreement about whether or not it'll even happen, or what form it will take.

Social networking giant Facebook is using its artificial intelligence (AI) technology and resources to map the entire Earth and launch the world's most detailed population maps that will help it beam cheap internet to remote areas. To begin with, the Facebook AI team crunched 14.6 billion images of maps from across 20 countries, including India, covering 21.6 million sq kms to come up with the first detailed map of human settlement for these countries. "This is an impressive project from our team developing solar-powered planes for beaming down internet connectivity and our AI research team. Many people live in remote communities and accurate data on where people live doesn't always exist," wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a latest post. The 20 countries mapped were Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Madagascar, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

Each are British artificial intelligence and machine learning startups bought by US tech giants--HP, Google, Microsoft, and Apple, respectively. Alongside growing VC funding in AI, US tech firms are snapping up British-founded startups, leading to concerns that the UK is losing the best of its artificial intelligence to Silicon Valley just as it becomes a key technology. Simon Walker, partner in corporate technology at law firm Taylor Wessing, said the sale of AI startups to US firms isn't new and doesn't look like it'll stop soon. "It is obviously disappointing that the AI cannot be retained in the UK," he said. "However, top-of-the-market AI, such as that developed by companies such as SwiftKey and DeepMind, requires huge investment and a significant platform for its use and it is only very large tech companies which have the necessary resources and platforms."

The move didn't make sense to the humans packed into the sixth floor of Seoul's Four Seasons hotel. But the Google machine saw it quite differently. The machine knew the move wouldn't make sense to all those humans. And yet it played the move anyway, because this machine has seen so many moves that no human ever has. In the second game of this week's historic Go match between Lee Sedol, one of the world's top players, and AlphaGo, an artificially intelligent computing system built by a small team of Google researchers, this surprisingly skillful machine made a move that flummoxed everyone from the throngs of reporters and photographers to the match commentators to, yes, Lee Sedol himself.

"I believe that AliveCor's approach to empowering people to be proactive with their heart health data is going to significantly impact the way we think about healthcare," said Simon Prakash, vice president of products and design of AliveCor. "I look forward to expanding upon what the team has already created, and working to get our technology into the hands of more people." "We are excited to welcome both Frank and Simon to the AliveCor leadership team. Frank is one of the most renowned experts in visualization engineering and Simon is a leader in product integrity and design. Their unique skills in both software and hardware engineering and machine learning are in line with our company goals and will help further our vision of saving more lives by producing the most innovative Wearable MedTech devices and services," said Vic Gundotra, chief executive officer of AliveCor.

Data can't be racist or sexist, but the way it is used can help reinforce discrimination. The internet means more data is collected about us than ever before and it is used to make automatic decisions that can hugely affect our lives, from our credit scores to our employment opportunities. If that data reflects unfair social biases against sensitive attributes, such as our race or gender, the conclusions drawn from that data might also be based on those biases. But this era of "big data" doesn't need to to entrench inequality in this way. If we build smarter algorithms to analyse our information and ensure we're aware of how discrimination and injustice may be at work, we can actually use big data to counter our human prejudices. This kind of problem can arise when computer models are used to make predictions in areas such as insurance, financial loans and policing.