Editor's note: This is the third in a series of articles about the effects of software and automation on the economy. You can read the other stories here and here. The way Hod Lipson describes his Creative Machines Lab captures his ambitions: "We are interested in robots that create and are creative." Lipson, an engineering professor at Cornell University (this July he's moving his lab to Columbia University), is one of the world's leading experts on artificial intelligence and robotics. His research projects provide a peek into the intriguing possibilities of machines and automation, from robots that "evolve" to ones that assemble themselves out of basic building blocks. A few years ago, Lipson demonstrated an algorithm that explained experimental data by formulating new scientific laws, which were consistent with ones known to be true. He had automated scientific discovery. Lipson's vision of the future is one in which machines and software possess abilities that were unthinkable until recently.

Jeff J Mitchell / Getty ImagesThe robots are coming. But it's not just low-paying positions that will get replaced. AI also could cause high earning (like top 5% of American salaries) jobs to disappear. That's the theme of New York Times reporter Nathaniel Popper's new feature, The Robots Are Coming for Wall Street. The piece is framed around Daniel Nadler, the founder of Kensho, an analytics company that's transforming finance.

When Willie Kate Friar wakes in the middle of the night, the octogenarian doesn't have to turn on the lights or crane her neck to find out the time. She simply asks her digital assistant, who responds in a life-like voice. "I've found Alexa is like a companion," Friar said of Amazon Echo's new voice-controlled assistant, a black cylinder called Alexa. A Panama-based retiree who writes and lectures on cruise boats, Friar is recuperating from a recent fall and asks Alexa to play music during her physical therapy sessions. "The music lifts my spirits," she said.

During Chevron Corporation's (NYSE:CVX) Security Analyst meeting on March 8, several big pieces of news came out. A day before the meeting, Chevron issued a press release stating that its 54 billion Gorgon LNG facility in Australia had just started producing LNG (liquefied natural gas) and condensate. After originally estimated to be operational by the end of 2014 for under 30 billion USD, the project was delayed as costs skyrocketed. As the operator with a 47.3% stake, Chevron lost a lot of credibility due to the massive cost of its mishaps, as did its partners ExxonMobil (NYSE:XOM) and Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE:RDS.A) (NYSE:RDS.B), who each own 25% of the venture. The first cargo of LNG is expected to be shipped out very soon, potentially marking the beginning of a strong source of growth after all the headaches it took to get here.

Ishiguro does not expect the average household to buy a Geminoid -- in part because of the 100,000 price tag -- but he already has some orders from researchers. He does expect his smaller CommU communicative robots to make their way inside many households within the next couple of years. Like Amazon's Echo -- but much cuter -- these chatty robots use voice recognition technology and artificial intelligence to simulate conversation. An example of where they can be useful is in tutoring, said Ishiguro. Many Japanese learners struggle with speaking English because they do not get enough practice.

John Hennessy joined Stanford in 1977 right after receiving his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He soon became a leader of Reduced Instruction Set Computers. This research led to the founding of MIPS Computer Systems, which was later acquired for 320 million. There are still nearly a billion MIPS processors shipped annually, 30 years after the company was founded. Hennessy returned to Stanford to do foundational research in large-scale shared memory multiprocessors. In his spare time, he co-authored two textbooks on computer architecture, which have been continuously revised and are still popular 25 years later. This record led to numerous honors, including ACM Fellow, election to both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. Not resting on his research and teaching laurels, he quickly moved up the academic administrative ladder, going from the CS department chair to Engineering college dean to provost and finally to president in just seven years. He is Stanford's tenth president, its first from engineering, and he has governed it for an eighth of its existence. Since 2000, he doubled Stanford's endowment, including a record 6.2 billion for a single campaign. He used those funds to launch many initiatives--which often cross departmental lines--along with new buildings to house them. Undergraduate applications also doubled, for the first time making Stanford even more selective than Harvard.

I was lucky enough to represent ACM and ACM-W at the recent Ada Lovelace Symposium at Oxford University, celebrating her 200th birthday. I participated in a panel "Enchantress of Abstraction and Bride of Science: can women scientists escape being icons, role-models and heroines." Why do so many current organizations and events identify with and recognize Ada Lovelace? We are well into the 21st century; Ada was born 200 years ago. Why do so many women today seem to look to her as a model and icon?

It described as "fundamentally vague" Stephen Goose's ethical line in his Point side of the Point/Counterpoint debate "The Case for Banning Killer Robots" in the same issue. I encourage all ACM members to read or re-read them and consider if they themselves should be working on lethal autonomous weapons or even on any kind of weapon. Ronald Arkin's Counterpoint was optimistic regarding robots' ability to "... exceed human moral performance ...," writing that a ban on autonomous weapons "... ignores the moral imperative to use technology to reduce the atrocities and mistakes that human warfighters make." This analysis involved two main problems. First, Arkin tacitly assumed autonomous weapons will be used only by benevolent forces, and the "moral performance" of such weapons is incorruptible by those deploying them.

Suresh Venkatasubramanian of the University of Utah presented a method for finding disparate impact in algorithms last year at the ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. If you have ever searched for hotel rooms online, you have probably had this experience: surf over to another website to read a news story and the page fills up with ads for travel sites, offering deals on hotel rooms in the city you plan to visit. Buy something on Amazon, and ads for similar products will follow you around the Web. The practice of profiling people online means companies get more value from their advertising dollars and users are more likely to see ads that interest them. The practice has a downside, though, when the profiling is based on sensitive attributes, such as race, sex, or sexual orientation.

Peter Naur, a Danish computer scientist and 2005 recipient of the ACM A.M. Turing Award for fundamental contributions to programming language design and the definition of Algol 60, to compiler design, and to the art and practice of computer programming, died January 3 after a brief illness. Born in Fredricksberg, Denmark, Naur studied astronomy at the University of Copenhagen, where he received his Ph.D. in that field before going to Kings College Cambridge in the 1950s to conduct research both into astronomy and the emerging field of computer programming. As he told Computerworld Denmark in a 2014 interview (http://bit.ly/1O13v1I), "I had the great privilege to get to Cambridge in the early 1950s. Here I discovered that calculations of planetary motion that could take several hours, could now be carried out in seconds with a computer."