Australian bank Westpac is to trial the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in its digital banking systems, as it looks to automate customers' queries. With the rise of digital banking, Westpac's general manager of consumer digital, Travis Tyler, says it is looking at using "bots" to respond to customers' simple questions. One example includes the bank working on a "proof of concept" over the next six months for a digital system to provide answers to consumer questions about the best deposit rates available. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Tyler says: "If your term deposit is rolling over, and you simply ask, 'What's the best rate, this is what I want to achieve?', it will come back with the best options and you can simply say, 'Yeah, book it.'" Another example cited by Tyler includes answering simple questions about payments between accounts.

Colin O'Donnell is the chief innovation officer of Intersection. It clogs systems, causes accidents, wastes energy and makes people unhappy. It's more than a bad experience on a website -- in cities, bad user experience (UX) design can actually kill. We're talking about signage, public spaces, civic and emergency communications and other forms of urban design that influence our daily routines and, in some cases, are there expressly for our safety. As more parts of our cities go digital, we have the opportunity to make cities not just safer and more functional, but more human, intuitive and enjoyable with UX that's responsive to the world around us. While bad UX can cause anxiety, confusion and even injury, great user experience design can create efficiencies, keep us safe, get us where we are going faster and turn everyday city drudgery into moments of discovery, surprise and enjoyment.

How many windows were in the house or apartment in which you lived when you were ten? Can you name all 50 states? What was served at your birthday party when you were 13? When you came back from your first trip abroad, how did you describe the experience to your friends? What was the most difficult interaction you ever had with a teacher and what did you learn from that experience?

With the unemployment rate falling to 5.3 percent, the lowest in seven years, policy makers are heaving a sigh of relief. Indeed, with the technology boom in progress, there is a lot to be optimistic about. Manufacturing will be returning to U.S. shores with robots doing the job of Chinese workers; American carmakers will be mass-producing self-driving electric vehicles; technology companies will develop medical devices that greatly improve health and longevity; we will have unlimited clean energy and 3D print our daily needs. The cost of all of these things will plummet and make it possible to provide for the basic needs of every human being. I am talking about technology advances that are happening now, which will bear fruit in the 2020s. But policy makers will have a big new problem to deal with: the disappearance of human jobs. Not only will there be fewer jobs for people doing manual work, the jobs of knowledge workers will also be replaced by computers.

I began my dating app experience much later in life. I was anxious to get started the moment I upgraded devices. The first and most obvious download was the infamous Tinder, renowned as a hook-up app but also responsible for significant relationships for several of my friends. A female friend offered to look at my profile and provide some tips. She quickly started searching through my Facebook pictures and then completely rewrote my description.

I was electrified by Jonathan Berger's music before I knew he wrote about music. His chamber works arise out of a lightning storm of modernist angles, dramatic and startling, though anchored to melodies that sail like a swallow, as one of his string quartets is called. His one-act operas Theotokia and The War Reporter, performed together in concert, match taut musical brocades to the hallucinations of, respectively, a schizophrenic, hearing voices of various mothers, and a photojournalist, based on Paul Watson, who won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for his image of the corpse of an American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. A few years ago, I read some of Jonathan's academic writing about music, which had a sharp focus on neurology and acoustics. He is a professor of music at Stanford, where he teaches composition, music theory, and cognition at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. On a hunch that he could connect with a popular audience, I asked him to write an essay for Nautilus about how composers upend expectations to keep listeners off guard and engaged. That article, "Composing Your Thoughts," and his next one for Nautilus, "How Music Hijacks Our Perception of Time," which contain musical clips to illustrate his points, have been among our most popular articles. There's a certain amount of problem solving that happens in the context of a band of noise. For this month's issue I called Jonathan and was delighted to learn he had thought a lot about noise.

There's a small but growing handful of robotics companies trying to make it in the warehouse market with systems that work with humans on order fulfillment. Generally, we're talking about clever wheeled platforms that can autonomously deliver goods from one place to another, while humans continue do the most challenging part: picking items off of shelves. There's a lot of value here, since using robots to move stuff frees up humans to spend more of their time picking. Ideally, however, you'd have the robot doing the picking as well, but this is a very difficult problem in terms of sensing, motion planning, and manipulation. And getting a robot do pick reliably at a speed that could make it a viable human replacement is more difficult still.

You've studied machine learning, you're a dataframe master for massaging data, and you can easily pipe that data through a bunch of machine learning libraries. You go for a job interview at a SAAS company, you're given some raw data and labels and asked to predict churn, and come on - are these guys even trying? You generate the shit out of some features, you overfit the hell out of that multidimensional manifold just so you can back off and show off your knowledge of regularization, and then you put the icing on the cake by cross validating towards a better metric for the business problem than simple accuracy. You roll up on an ecommerce company, and they trick you by basically giving you no features. Ha! Nice try, but you know that's a classic recommender system.

Alan Mulally, CEO of Ford, poses inside the 2015 Ford Mustang on the set of Good Morning America on December 5, 2013 in New York City. Former Ford CEO Alan Mulally, who led Ford's turnaround during the Great Recession, said he has stayed involved in both the automotive industry and the aerospace industry as consultant and as a member of the board for both Google and 3D printing company Carbon 3D. "It really is amazing -- the convergence between digital technology and everything that is being touched by it," Mulally told the Detroit Free Press in a rare interview. Mulally changed the culture at Ford from internal divisions and back-stabbing to a unified team that embraced Mulally's "One Ford" overhaul plan. On Thursday night Mulally will be inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in metro Detroit, along with pioneering consumer advocate Ralph Nader and Roy Lunn, godfather of the original Ford GT40. "I think his greatest achievement was the culture shift he brought to Ford," Ford Executive Chairman Bill Ford said in an e-mail to the Free Press.

Rob High is an IBM Fellow, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, IBM Watson. He has overall responsibility to drive Watson technical strategy and thought leadership. As a key member of the Watson Leadership team, Rob works collaboratively with the Watson engineering, research, and development teams across IBM. Rob High will be speaking on the subject of artificial intelligence at Gigaom Change Leaders Summit in Austin, September 21-23rd. In anticipation of that, I caught up with him to ask a few questions about AI and it's potential impact on the business world.