As the automation of physical and knowledge work advances, many jobs will be redefined rather than eliminated--at least in the short term. The potential of artificial intelligence and advanced robotics to perform tasks once reserved for humans is no longer reserved for spectacular demonstrations by the likes of IBM's Watson, Rethink Robotics' Baxter, DeepMind, or Google's driverless car. Just head to an airport: automated check-in kiosks now dominate many airlines' ticketing areas. Pilots actively steer aircraft for just three to seven minutes of many flights, with autopilot guiding the rest of the journey. Passport-control processes at some airports can place more emphasis on scanning document bar codes than on observing incoming passengers.

SINGAPORE: Artificial intelligence: Two words that have been bandied about everywhere to seemingly give anything a shimmer of technological star dust. Choose the latest AI-enabled machine to better clean your clothes. There's an AI chatbot waiting to answer all your queries. Yet, the buzzword also throws up questions for many. Does artificial intelligence mean robots?

We, the undersigned, call upon governments and government leaders to create a future with strong international norms, regulations and laws against lethal autonomous weapons. These currently being absent, we opt to hold ourselves to a high standard: we will neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade, or use of lethal autonomous weapons. We ask that technology companies and organizations, as well as leaders, policymakers, and other individuals, join us in this pledge.

Donald Trump has responded to the EU's decision to charge Google with a record-breaking fine. "I told you so!" the president tweeted. "The European Union just slapped a Five Billion Dollar fine on one of our great companies, Google. They truly have taken advantage of the US, but not for long!" The post is just the latest mark of deteriorating relations between the EU and the US.

The Pentagon is making a massive push to accelerate the application of artificial intelligence to ships, tanks, aircraft, drones, weapons and large networks as part of a sweeping strategy to more quickly harness and integrate the latest innovations. Many forms of AI are already well-underway with U.S. military combat systems, yet new technologies and applications are emerging so quickly that Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan has directed the immediate creation of a new Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. "The Deputy Secretary of Defense directed the DoD Chief Information Officer to standup the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center in order to enable teams across DoD to swiftly deliver new AI-enabled capabilities and effectively experiment with new operating concepts in support of DoD's military missions and business functions." DoD spokeswoman Heather Babb told Warrior Maven. Pentagon officials intend for the new effort to connect otherwise disparate AI developments across the services.

DARPA's efforts to propel military technology forward often manifest in a diverse fashion, spanning everything from drone submarine development to a biostasis program that aims to buy more time to rescue soldiers on the battlefield. The SHRIMP program, short for SHort-Range Independent Microrobotic Platforms, is another potentially life-saving initiative that is being designed to navigate through hazardous natural disaster zones. What differentiates SHRIMP from microrobotics limited by SWaP (size, weight and power) constraints is its size. DARPA has managed to shrink the tech down to the size of an insect -- a scale of mm-to-cm. Program manager Dr. Ronald Polcawich says the smaller scale is what gives SHRIMP robots an advantage over larger robots -- which are too large to inspect damaged environments.

In the early hours of January 11, 2000, US Coast Guard helicopter pilot Mark Ward responded to a distress call from a ship taking on water, caught in a Nor'easter off the North Carolina coast. Battling 70-mph winds and 30-foot seas, Ward struggled to keep the chopper steady as he and his crew pulled all five fishermen to safety. Ward recalls the mission as one of the most harrowing is the 22 years he spent as a search-and-rescue pilot. And now, he's got a gig ensuring his successors won't face the same dangers: He's the chief test pilot in Sikorsky's autonomous helicopter program. "Even a modest degree of autonomy, your workload goes way down and your stress and apprehension disappears," he says.

When we discuss about artificial intelligence (AI), how are machines learning? What kinds of projects feed into greater understanding? For our friends over at IBM, one surprising answer is movies. To build smarter AI systems, IBM researchers are using movie plots and neural networks to explore new ways of enhancing the language understanding capabilities of AI models. IBM will present key findings from two papers on these topics at the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) annual meeting this week in Melbourne, Australia.

The British University in Dubai (BUiD) has launched the country's first bachelors degree in artificial intelligence to support the UAE's 2031 AI strategy. BUiD, the research-based university, said the degree has been developed in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh and is open to both Emiratis and expatriates. It told media at a press conference attended by Omar bin Sultan Al Olama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, that the four-year degree course will start at the end of September, and tuition fees will total AED230,000. The course follows the announcement last year by the UAE of the appointment of the world's first Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence which followed the unveiling of the UAE 2031 AI strategy, which aims to make the government more efficient and streamlined by developing AI technologies. In May, Al Olama said the UAE government is expected to save $3 billion per year, thanks to AI and blockchain. The technologies are two of the most powerful tools revolutionizing the UAE's pace of innovation, he said at the Future Blockchain Summit.

A couple of years ago, as Brian Brackeen was preparing to pitch his facial recognition software to a potential customer as a convenient, secure alternative to passwords, the software stopped working. Panicked, he tried adjusting the room's lighting, then the Wi-Fi connection, before he realized the problem was his face. Brackeen is black, but like most facial recognition developers, he'd trained his algorithms with a set of mostly white faces. He got a white, blond colleague to pose for the demo, and they closed the deal. It was a Pyrrhic victory, he says: "It was like having your own child not recognize you."