London entrepreneurs have a constructive debate over the relative methods of taking venture capital versus bootstrapping your business. The city's tech scene is at a pivotal moment, continuing to boom even as the country debate's its future in the European Union, a decision which will have huge implications for the future health of the industry. Meanwhile, radical new formats and mediums are starting to be explored in earnest, from artificial intelligence to virtual reality. At Google's annual I/O Extended event in London, Business Insider sat down with a handful of exciting London Android developers and CEOs, from luxury smartphone business Vertu to fast-growing language learning app startup Memrise. We wanted to hear what they're excited -- and worried -- about over the year ahead.

Robots are helping to keep the lights on in China's Anhui province. The robots look remarkably like Disney's lovable "Wall-E." Don't let that fool you, though. The machines are hard at work. Humans tell the robots what to keep an eye on, but the inspector bots do their job on their own.

If you're a child of the '80s like me, you might recognize this famous line from the movie WarGames. This innocent-sounding question comes not from one of the movie's human stars, but from a military super-computer named Joshua, after a bored high school student, played by Matthew Broderick, accesses the computer's hard drive. Thinking he's hacked into a video game company, Broderick's character accepts Joshua's challenge and chooses the most intriguing game he can find: global thermonuclear war. Joshua is an intelligent computer programmed to learn through simulations like the one Broderick's character initiates. And because the computer actually does control the arsenal of U.S. nuclear weapons, it's a "game" that puts the planet on the brink of World War III.

For those thinking of law school, keep in mind that technology may revolutionize the profession before you earn that J.D. In the research-driven, labor-intensive legal profession, the age-old question of man vs. machine is being answered as some law firms have begun to use an "artificially intelligent attorney" to research and hash out legal issues – a trend that legal minds predict will displace some human lawyers. Called ROSS, the robot lawyer uses IBM's cognitive computer program Watson to learn from experience to gain speed when answering legal questions, according to its creators. It can read through the entire body of law to return a cited answer, monitor the law to recognize other court decisions that could affect the case at hand, and even glean conclusions from more than one billion legal documents per second, they add. Its creation comes on the heels of a 2014 analysis that predicted artificial intelligence will cause "structural collapse" of law firms by 2030. As for the robo-lawyer, one law professor said the technology will displace some workers.

A simple Google image search highlighted on Twitter has been said to highlight the pervasiveness of racial bias and media profiling. "Three black teenagers" was a trending search on Google on Thursday after a US high school student pointed out the stark difference in results for "three black teenagers" and "three white teenagers". Kabir Alli of Virginia posted a clip to Twitter of himself carrying out a straightforward search of "three black teenagers", which overwhelmingly turns up prisoners' mugshots. He and others erupt in laughter when the result for "three white teenagers" show stock photos of smiling, wholesome-looking young people. The tweet has been retweeted by more than 60,100 users and favourited nearly 55,500 times since it was posted on Tuesday – but Alli's video was later reposted by World Star Hip Hop, an entertainment website with an enormous following on social media.

Rich Sutton is old school king of RL.

Students and faculty in several of Colorado State University's online programs will begin using "intelligent tutoring" technology in courses this fall. This comes as CSU Online announced last week a new partnership with Cognii, Inc., a leading provider of Artificial Intelligence-based educational technology. CSU faculty and instructional designers will work with Cognii to develop learning and assessment tools powered by Cognii's Virtual Learning Assistant, which is designed to improve students' learning outcomes, increase instructors' productivity, and enable high-quality personalized education at a large scale. "The use of Cognii in the classroom is expected to improve learning outcomes, turning assessment into learning while enhancing the effectiveness of the time our faculty devote to teaching," said Mike Palmquist, CSU's Associate Provost for Instructional Innovation. "Through this partnership, CSU is on the cutting edge of recent research and innovation in the fields of natural language processing, cognitive sciences, and machine learning, and an example of how the University is taking bold steps toward transforming access to quality education."

Since the second half of the 1990s, productivity growth has accelerated in the US due to the Information Technology (IT) Revolution. However, the productivity effects of traditional types of IT were exhausted by mid-2000 (e.g. Today, the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics?referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution?on the future economy and society is attracting attention, and many speculative arguments have arisen regarding the possible effects of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In particular, the substitution of human labour by AI and robots is being hotly discussed. The Japanese government has begun efforts to develop and diffuse AI and robotics technologies.

As readers of my blog will know, I want to learn more about machine learning. I've managed to run some samples and I've built my own first little samples. It feels like the next step is to understand more about the different algorithms, for example when to pick which one and how to tune the parameters to achieve the best results. To learn more, I've started to watch the first hours of the awesome courses below. The courses are a great introduction to machine learning and very different from most other videos I found which often seem to assume you are already a data scientist.

Today, Canadian artificial intelligence company Maluuba released state-of-the-art results for a type of machine learning focused on teaching computers to read like humans do. Companies like Google, Facebook, and IBM have actively been working on this area of research -- known as machine learning comprehension -- but experts agree it's not nearly as advanced as image and voice recognition technology. Maluuba's results show that, in the near future, machines could be able to understand text like we do. Maluuba has built a program called EpiReader. It's designed to solve a specific kind of machine comprehension task: a word is removed from a block of text and EpiReader determines the missing word based on context.