Speaking to the BBC this week, chief economist at the Bank of England Andy Haldane said that disruption caused by the Fourth Industrial Revolution would be "on a much greater scale" than that experienced during the First Industrial Revolution in the Victorian period. Advising that the UK required a skills revolution to counteract individuals becoming "technologically unemployed", Haldane said that training was necessary to ensure workers could leverage new job opportunities as they became available in the era of artificial intelligence. The accountancy industry is one sector primed to capitalise on the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The sector has already embraced automation, with intelligent software removing the traditional compliance aspect of the accountant role. And, as the government's Making Tax Digital initiative edges ever closer, the implementation of a digital tax system has encouraged accountants across the UK to confront how they view and employ technology on a day-to-day basis.

TAMPA, FLORIDA – Two years after launching from Florida, a NASA spacecraft is closing in on an ancient asteroid, Bennu, for a sample of space dust that could reveal clues to the start of life in the solar system. The spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, has even snapped its first, blurry pic of the cosmic body, which is about the size of a small mountain, about 500 yards (meters) in diameter. The spacecraft is designed to circle Bennu, and reach out with a robotic arm to "high-five" its surface, then return the sample it collects to Earth in 2023. The first images of Bennu were taken on Aug. 17 at a distance of 1.4 million miles (2.3 million km) from the $800 million spacecraft. "This is the closest we have even been to Bennu," said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Michael Abramoff, MD, PhD, president and director of IDx. We are the first-ever system to get FDA approval that makes a clinical decision without physician oversight. To date that is our major accomplishment. Thank you so much for doing this with us! I am physician, an ophthalmologist, retinal specialist and surgeon with deep experience in IT, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is surpassing human performance in a growing number of domains. However, there is limited evidence of its economic effects. Using data from a digital platform, we study a key application of AI: machine translation. We find that the introduction of a machine translation system has significant increased international trade on this platform, increasing exports by 17.5%. Furthermore, heterogeneous treatment effects are all consistent with a substantial reduction in translation-related search costs. Our results provide causal evidence that language barriers significantly hinder trade and that AI has already begun to improve economic efficiency in at least one domain.

As machine learning increasingly supports consequential decision making, its vulnerability to manipulation and gaming is of growing concern. When individuals learn to adapt their behavior to the specifics of a statistical decision rule, its original predictive power will deteriorate. This widely observed empirical phenomenon, known as Campbell's Law or Goodhart's Law, is often summarized as: "Once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" [25]. Institutions using machine learning to make high-stakes decisions naturally wish to make their classifiers robust to strategic behavior. A growing line of work has sought algorithms that achieve higher utility for the institution in settings where we anticipate a strategic response from the the classified individuals [10, 5, 14]. Broadly speaking, the resulting solution concepts correspond to more conservative decision boundaries that increase robustness to some form of covariate shift.

With the rising influence of machine learning algorithms on many important aspects of our daily lives, there are growing concerns that biases inherent in data can lead the behavior of these algorithms to discriminate against certain populations [1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 28, 29, 15]. In recent years, substantial research effort has been devoted to the development of mathematical definitions of bias, or its opposite, fairness, in algorithms and in data [15, 18, 26, 23, 19, 32]. In this work, we focus on the fairness scenario where there are multiple protected attributes that we aim to ensure fairness for, and which may potentially overlap with each other, such as gender, race, and sexual orientation. Our guiding principle is intersectionality, the core theoretical framework underlying the thirdwave feminist movement [13]. The principle of intersectionality states that racism, sexism, and other social systems which harm marginalized groups are interlocking in their effects, such that the lived experience of, e.g., black women, is very different than that of, e.g., white women. Intersectionality was defined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1980's [13] and popularized in the 1990's, e.g. by Patricia Hill Collins [10], although the ideas are much older [11, 35]. In the context of machine learning and fairness, intersectionality was recently considered by [7], who studied the impact of the intersection of gender and skin color on computer vision performance, and by [23, 19], who aimed to protect certain subgroups in order to prevent "fairness gerrymandering."

Today, all you have to do to find your way around a new city is fire up Google Maps, Waze, or one of the many other GPS-based navigation apps available. Follow the steps, and, bam, you get where you need to go. We don't have that same luxury in space. But now, researchers from NASA's Frontier Development Lab (FDL) and Intel are working to change that. They've found a way to make it just as easy to navigate a new planet -- they just needed a little help from artificial intelligence (AI) to do it.

A new facial recognition technology caught a man trying to enter the US using a passport belonging to someone else, US officials say. Officials with the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Office of Field Operations (OFO) intercepted a 26-year-old man, the agencies referred to as an "imposter", who reportedly attempted to use a French passport belonging to someone else, at Washington's Dulles International Airport. The man was travelling to the US from Brazil. "The officer utilised CBP's new facial comparison biometric technology which confirmed the man was not a match to the passport he presented," the CBP press release read. It added: "A search revealed the man's authentic Republic of Congo identification card concealed in his shoe."

In 2014, Yuval Noah Harari's life changed completely. The little-known academic was thrust into the international literary spotlight when his book on the history of humans from the discovery of fire to modern robotics, Sapiens, was translated into English. Then-US President Barack Obama said the book gave him a new perspective on "the core things that have allowed us to build this extraordinary civilisation that we take for granted". It went on to sell more than eight million copies worldwide. "I still see myself as a historian," says Harari. "I don't think that historians are experts in the past, historians are specialists in change and how things change and we learn the nature of change by looking at the past."

Yuval Noah Harari was catapulted into the international literary spotlight in 2014 following the English translation of his book Sapiens. The book, which covers the history of humanity from the discovery of fire to modern robotics, became a non-fiction publishing phenomenon, feted by then-US President Barack Obama and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and went on to sell more than eight million copies worldwide. In his next book, Homo Deus, the Israeli historian and author explored how the growth of big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and biotechnology could radically alter and divide human society, perhaps ending the species altogether. The same themes crop up again in his latest work, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which collects essays, talks and responses to his readers in a series of observations on everything from meditation to climate change. In an interview with the Talk to Al Jazeera programme, Harari discussed technology, immigration and politics with Al Jazeera's Harry Fawcett in Tel Aviv. Editor's note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.