Sign up for our newsletter to not miss out on tomorrow's game-changers for your industry. At Mobile World Congress this year, I got to moderate the most interesting panel of the whole show. Okay, I may be a bit biased as I created the idea of the panel The unreal reality: what is real when AI, VR and AR are mainstream? We kept circling back to human kind's seemingly inherent distrust of Artificial Intelligence (AI). But I think my colleague Manoj P M had a great point: "People think AI will be a replacement for humans, but actually it won't," he said.

Amazon's Alexa already boasts more than 10,000 skills, but has now added medical advice to its repertoire. WebMD announced today that it's launched its own skill for all Alexa-enabled devices (including the Echo, Echo Dot, and Fire TV), which can answer basic health-related queries. Topics include treatments for common ailments ("Alexa, ask WebMD how to treat a sore throat"), definitions of basic diseases ("Alexa, ask WebMD what diabetes is"), and the side effects of certain drugs ("Alexa, ask WebMD to tell me about amoxicillin"). WebMD stresses that, like its website, the new Alexa skill is only meant to offer supplementary information, and adds that the software is a work-in-progress. "We want to be in the place where we believe computing is going," WebMD's vice president of mobile products, Ben Greenberg, tells The Verge.

Genevera I. Allen (left) is a professor in the Departments of Statistics, and the Electrical and Computer Engineering, at Rice University. Corinne Cath (right) is a doctoral student at the Alan Turing Institute, the national institute for data science in UK. Below are extracts of recent interviews that are most relevant to our audience. Links to full interviews are provided. Genevera, what do you think of the shift from "Statistics" to "Statistical Learning and Data Science" in the statistics community (The "Data vs Math" Question?)

In an economy where value is generated by digital efficiency, I believe that every organization should strive for digital flow. For an introduction to digital flow, see Digital Transformation Isn't A Goal. It's A Journey.There are three central forces of flow: Design Thinking, Platform Thinking, and Open Thinking. This article focuses on Design Thinking. Digital technology is complex, but users should never know it.

Most press coverage of AWS's recent outage has explained the event as having been caused by a "typo" that one of its engineers made when updating a billing subsystem. The'typo' spin on this story may be the media's way of dramatizing the blunder and making it easy to explain. Certainly, Amazon's own post-mortem noted that "one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly {read'typo'} and a larger set of servers was removed than intended." I believe that Amazon is trying to shift the blame from how they have designed, protected and audited their systems – a systemic process that affects all of their operations – and have instead chosen to portray this as a one-off event that happened just within one small subsystem bcause someone didn't follow the approved playbook. Google's advice to make it hard for errors to happen follows the practice of all leading safety organizations.

Readers of The Right Stuff long knew that founder "Mike Enoch" had two main interests: technology and white supremacy. Posts on the neo-Nazi site have included discussion of "a new blogging platform built on node.js," while other less techie content has alluded to the "chimpout" in Ferguson, putting Jews in ovens, and Trump's "top-tier troll" of Jews on Holocaust Remembrance Day. In January, Enoch was outed as Mike Peinovich, a Manhattan-based software engineer. His unmasking highlighted a lingering question about the racist far-right movement that rose to prominence with Donald Trump's election: What support might the so-called alt-right have among techies? Ever since I began investigating the extremist groups lining up behind Trump last spring, several of their leaders have made big claims to me about an alt-right following in Silicon Valley and across the broader tech industry. "The average alt-right-ist is probably a 28-year old tech-savvy guy working in IT," white nationalist Richard Spencer insisted when I interviewed him a few weeks before the election.

When John Forbes Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, schizophrenic, and paranoid delusional, was asked how he could believe that space aliens had recruited him to save the world, he gave a simple response. "Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously." Nash is hardly the only so-called mad genius in history. Even ignoring those great creators who did not kill themselves in a fit of deep depression, it remains easy to list persons who endured well-documented psychopathology, including the composer Robert Schumann, the poet Emily Dickinson, and Nash.

The video-game designer Shigeru Miyamoto once called the land of Hyrule "a miniature garden that you can put into a drawer and revisit anytime you like." Miyamoto conceived Hyrule, the setting for Nintendo's Legend of Zelda series, in 1986, and though its layout has changed often in the intervening decades, its ambiance of bucolic, occasionally threatening whimsy hasn't. Neither has the company's understanding of Zelda's essential purpose: to bring the great outdoors--the rollicking hills, the whispering caves, all that breezy, alfresco escapade--indoors. In recent years, Miyamoto, who is now sixty-four, has retreated to the position of Zelda's overseer, relinquishing control to younger directors inside the clandestine, Willy Wonka-esque factory that is Nintendo's Kyoto headquarters. But Hyrule remains indelibly his.

We saw a transition in the financial ecosystem from the Keynesian "animal spirits" of desk traders and investors to "microbe spirits" by computer algorithms simpler than animals or humans -- but just much, much, much faster. To understand these new phenomena we need a complexity approach. Econophysicists and financial gurus in complexity are no more in the fringe. What our work suggests is that since this war is already under way, and because from our paper it seems to correlate very well with observable crashes in the markets over timescales such as months, then any government watchdog/regulator charged with controlling their financial system also ought to have its own'troops on the ground'.» Not that this is wrong, but you can see that this level of competition would be very ferocious -- which is what happens in the markets.»

Do you think you can tell a piece of music composed by artificial intelligence (AI) from one created by a human composer? Before you read any further, let's find out. The following audio consists of two fragments, one written by AI, the other by a human. We're inviting 250 to exhibit at TNW Conference and pitch on stage! If you didn't get it right the first time, no worries--we'll have a couple more mini-quizzes like this below.