Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages. For eons they have carried out a huge variety of tasks, from manufacturing goods, to transporting people around, to helping us decipher the natural world, to simply entertaining us. Machines can fight, protect, heal, and even teach us. But what they have not been able to do until quite recently is to learn, make decisions, and act on their own. Today, intelligent machines are everywhere. From the Netflix recommendation en- gine to Google Translate to Appleâ s Siri voice-recognition system, artificial intelligence has become sufficiently accurate, reliable, and useful to find its way into numerous devices and applications. These technologies have taken off in parallel with a dramatic expan- sion of the amount and complexity of data, which provides fertile teaching ground from which machines can learn to make intelligent decisions on their own.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Our BratWurst Bot is an autonomous robot that grills sausages all by itself. It is made of off the shelf robotic components: Universal Robots UR-10 arm, Schunk PG-70 gripper, two standard RGB cameras, normal grill tongs and gas grill.

The company's cutting-edge A.I. is using its virtual brains to cut electricity costs at Google data centers. And like it did at Go, DeepMind excels at this game -- it figured out how to reduce cooling bills by 40 percent. Beating a world class Go player was one kind of achievement for A.I., but this development could wind up making that seem trivial. Google's fed massive amounts of information on its data centers' energy consumption habits into an "ensemble of deep neural networks," hoping that the smart-machine could make some efficiency updates. Engineers have long toiled to reduce consumption in data centers, which are (necessarily) notorious energy sucks, mostly because Google cares about reducing its impact.

"Who cares if we find out we lost a customer after she left?" The objective of predictive analytics is not just understand why you lost a customer but how to prevent you from losing one before it happens. Insight, not hindsight is the essence of predictive analytics. How organizations instrument, capture, create and use data is fundamentally changing the dynamics of work, life and leisure. Analytics is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data (corporate, product, channel, and customer). All of these need data. Data is the new oil. Cloud is the new pipeline. Digital use cases is the new experience frontier.

Tech giant Google has taken a "phenomenal step forward" in its efforts to drive energy efficiency, after developing artificial intelligence (AI) that has reduced energy consumption at its data centres by 40%. Google has been able to achieve 3.5 times more computing power from the same amount of energy compared to five years ago Google's data centres, although powered by renewables, still consume vast amounts of energy during cooling processes. Over the past 10 years, Google has developed the AI system using the'DeepMind' research company to live test a system of neural networks - computer systems modelled on the human brain - that have led to a more efficient and adaptive framework for data centre management. DeepMind has managed to train these neural networks to predict the temperature and pressure outputs within the centres, 60 minutes in advance before establishing the appropriate requirements to lower output and energy consumption. The system not only delivered 40% cuts to energy consumption, but also reduced Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) – the ratio of total building energy use to IT energy use – by as much as 15%.

Google announced on Wednesday that it has been using a DeepMind-built AI system to control certain parts of its power-hungry data centres over the last few months as it looks to make its vast server farms more environmentally friendly. Last year, a Greenpeace report predicted that the electricity consumption of data centres is set to account for 12% of global electricity consumption by 2017 and companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple have some of the biggest data centres in the world. Google said it has been able to reduce the energy consumption of its data centre cooling units -- used to stop Google's self-built servers from overheating -- by as much as 40% with the help of a DeepMind AI system.

Google put artificial intelligence Deepmind in charge of controlling parts of its data centers to reduce power consumption, manipulating computer servers and equipment to manage it. The result: A 15% improvement in power usage efficiency (PUE) that would eventually make their 600 million investment in the AI well worth the long-term savings, which could easily reach millions of dollars through the years to come. Notably, the typical electricity prices that companies pay in the U.S. range from about 25 to 40 per MWh. In 2014, Google says its electricity consumption totaled 4,402,836 MW--comparable to the average yearly consumption of more than 350,000 U.S. family homes, with its data centers hiking up their usage the most. DeepMind Co-Founder Demis Hassabis says the benefits of Deepmind is that, not only has the power usage decreased, it's a huge saving in terms of cost and also great for the environment.

As you're choking down your latest serving of Trump Clinton Brexit Racism Terrorism Wealth Gap Climate Change Casserole, you could use some good news. Let's start with The Inevitable, the new best-seller by Kevin Kelly, one of our wisest technological prognosticators. "This is the moment that folks in the future will look back at and say, 'Oh to have been alive and well back then!'" Kelly writes. "There has never been a better time with more opportunities, more openings, lower barriers, higher benefit/risk ratios, better returns, greater upside than now. In the mid-2010s, we're getting the first sneak peeks at a bouquet of technologies that can vastly improve the lives of most people on the planet and solve some of our hardest problems--even climate change. Just consider for a moment how much everyday life has been transformed since 2007, when smartphones, social networks and cloud computing took off at about the same time.

Google has finally revealed a commercial use for DeepMind -- a British artificial intelligence company it acquired for over 600 million in 2014. DeepMind made headlines for beating the best human in the world at the notoriously complex board game Go and it's recently started working with hospitals in the UK on a number of healthcare projects but the startup is yet to make any money for Google, until now. Google announced on Wednesday that it has been using a DeepMind-built AI system to control certain parts of its power-hungry data centres over the last few months as it looks to make its vast server farms more environmentally friendly. Last year, a Greenpeace report predicted that the electricity consumption of data centres is set to account for 12% of global electricity consumption by 2017 and companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple have some of the biggest data centres in the world. Google said it has been able to reduce the energy consumption of its data centre cooling units -- used to stop Google's self-built servers from overheating -- by as much as 40% with the help of a DeepMind AI system.

Google's DeepMind has reduced its power consumption thanks to artificial intelligence Google is using the firm's artificial intelligence system to control parts of its data centers, DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis told Bloomberg on Tuesday. DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, is using its AI engine to change how data center servers and cooling systems work to reduce power consumption. The company didn't say how much it's saving Google. Hassabis tipped a 15 percent improvement in power efficiency since Google launched the program this year, which he said is a "huge savings in terms of cost." The average electricity price in the U.S. can range from 25 to 40 per megawatt hour, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.