We've spent so long wringing our hands and worrying about artificial and virtual intelligence that we forgot to roll out the welcome mat when they finally arrived. Now, when major tech companies give their annual keynotes, they can't help but pepper the narrative with phrases like "machine learning." What does it all mean, though? Should we crank up the worry now that it looks like every tent-pole feature of self-learning software could also be a critical flaw? The future is here -- and it's equal parts exciting and terrifying.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is neither friend nor foe – It's both! This was the feedback received following a high level panel discussion held during the Science Forum South Africa (#SFSA2017) in Tshwane, were youth members from various African states exchanged their views and ideals as to how best they, business and government need to approach the digital age. "There is a paralysing fear that jobs will be taken away and humans will become redundant and lazy", said Barbara Glover of NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency. Glover added that these fears need to be allayed by understanding how best AI can unlock enhanced potential for humans to deploy their skills in new ways. Ama Duncan of Corporate Training Solutions in Ghana agreed.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is neither friend nor foe – It's both! This was the feedback received following a high level panel discussion held during the Science Forum South Africa (#SFSA2017) in Tshwane, were youth members from various African states exchanged their views and ideals as to how best they, business and government need to approach the digital age. "There is a paralysing fear that jobs will be taken away and humans will become redundant and lazy", said Barbara Glover of NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency. Glover added that these fears need to be allayed by understanding how best AI can unlock enhanced potential for humans to deploy their skills in new ways. Ama Duncan of Corporate Training Solutions in Ghana agreed.

I read with interest recent reports about China wanting to bring artificial intelligence (AI) to its classrooms to boost its education system. This brings us to the debate over whether artificial intelligence, that is, robots, will replace human teachers in the future. I believe that is unlikely. Of course, AI could help lighten the workload of classroom teachers, in areas like analysing students' past performance and optimising lessons accordingly; marking their tests and quizzes, and correcting their homework and assignments. Robot teachers could also deliver preprogrammed lessons and provide answers to frequently asked questions.

It seems that every day we read about newer and better applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Need a good movie to watch? Estimates now suggest that up to 47 percent of U.S. jobs may disappear in the coming decades due the rise of automation. But at the same time, "spillover" effects will fuel the creation of entirely new industries and job categories. These statistics reflect one of the greatest challenges--and opportunities--for teachers in our seemingly paradoxical modern economy.

Microsoft has set up an internal "AI University" in a bid to help it overcome the skills shortage in the booming field of artificial intelligence (AI). Chris Bishop, the director of a Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge, UK, told Business Insider that the Microsoft AI University is one of several schemes Microsoft has implemented to address the lack of talent in the field of AI, where there's fierce competition between tech firms to hire the best people. "We have a thing called AI University, which is an internal education programme so that people who are incredibly smart and capable but trained in a different domain can quickly learn about machine learning both in a foundational sense but also in a practical sense of how to use it," said Bishop. When it comes to AI talent, Microsoft is competing with the likes of Amazon and Apple, who also have research offices in Cambridge, as well as DeepMind (owned by Google), Facebook, Twitter, and many others. Chris Bishop is the head of a Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge.Microsoft The global battle for talent is raging because of the potential AI breakthroughs that bright minds stand to make in the next few years thanks to recent advances in computation power and the availability of vast data sets.

You've probably heard versions of each of the following ideas. With computers becoming remarkably adept at driving, understanding speech, and other tasks, more jobs could soon be automated than society is prepared to handle. This "superintelligence" will largely make human labor unnecessary. In fact, we'd better hope that machines don't eliminate us altogether, either accidentally or on purpose. Even though the first scenario is already under way, it won't necessarily lead to the second one.

A person's university years should be all about expanding your horizons, as well as meeting people with perspectives and backgrounds different from your own. Well, what could be more different than sharing your classroom with a robot? That's what 31 philosophy students at Notre Dame de Namur University in California recently experienced when they were joined in their "Philosophy of Love" program by Bina48, an A.I. animatronic robot. The robot participated via Skype in a series of sessions before appearing "in person" in the final class. "I wasn't sure how the students would react, but they were psyched about it," Professor William Barry, an associate professor of philosophy at Notre Dame de Namur, told Digital Trends.

Machine learning enables computers to learn from large amounts of data without being explicitly programmed to do so. We can already see how machine learning gives rise to new intelligent applications, from self-driving cars to intelligent assistants on our smartphones. Increasingly, businesses recognize the importance of using machine learning to transform their data assets into business value. However, many companies are unsure how machine learning can be applied to solve problems in an enterprise context. As the world's most relevant enterprise data is part of SAP's system and business network, SAP aspires to make all its enterprise solutions intelligent and help customers to leverage their data.

But that job is suddenly looking iffy as A.I. gets better at reading scans. A start-up called Arterys, to cite just one example, already has a program that can perform a magnetic-resonance imaging analysis of blood flow through a heart in just 15 seconds, compared with the 45 minutes required by humans. Maybe she wants to be a surgeon, but that job may not be safe, either. Robots already assist surgeons in removing damaged organs and cancerous tissue, according to Scientific American. Last year, a prototype robotic surgeon called STAR (Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot) outperformed human surgeons in a test in which both had to repair the severed intestine of a live pig.