Hospitals are still reliant on "archaic" fax machines with thousands still in use, a survey shows. Senior doctors said the continued use of the outdated technology was "ludicrous", and modern forms of communication were urgently needed. The poll, by the Royal College of Surgeons using freedom of information laws, revealed nearly 9,000 fax machines were in use across England. Newcastle upon Tyne NHS Trust topped the list, relying on 603 machines. "Alongside innovation like artificial intelligence and robot-assisted surgery, NHS hospital trusts remain stubbornly attached to using archaic fax machines for a significant proportion of their communications. This is ludicrous," said Richard Kerr, chair of the Royal College of Surgeons' Commission on the Future of Surgery.

Uber's dreams of a fleet of self-driving taxis may be on the rocks, if the firm's latest move is anything to go by. The ride-hailing company laid off 100 safety drivers after autonomous vehicle tests were suspended in the US, following a high profile crash in Arizona. Uber initially said it was not shuttering its entire autonomous vehicle program in the aftermath of the incident, in which 49 year old Elaine Herzberg died. Instead, it announced it was focusing on more limited testing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and California, aiming to resume self-driving this summer. That decision may have been revised, if the latest news is anything to go by, with all 100 redundancies at its Pittsburgh base of operations.

In 1978, some 400 ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) users received an email about a product viewing of new computer models. Gary Thuerk -- a marketer working for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) -- thought it would be a good idea to email people on the network to sell computer products. While it drew interest from some of the recipients, a portion expressed annoyance at the then-unnamed intrusive advertising. Several years later, the cybersecurity industry called emails of a similar nature "spam," describing it as unwanted bulk email advertising products or services. Unfortunately, Thuerk's incidental infamy in e-marketing decades ago has been surpassed by today's cybercriminals: In 2002, spam distribution reached 2.4 billion per day; today, it has reached more than 300 billion. And while previously the repercussions of the overwhelming volume of spam simply included system performance issues, they now include more serious complications especially for businesses as cybercriminals use spam for phishing and other malicious purposes.

As commerce and society feel the impact of digitization, automation proliferates along assembly lines and deployment of robotics gathers pace, an influential U.K. academic at the operating helm of the country's engineering academy says the time has come to ditch old clichés and have an apolitical holistic dialogue about future engineering skills. Meet Dr Hayaatun Sillem, Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering, who reckons such broader changes make it a "very interesting time" for engineers with the so-called Industry 4.0 or the next industrial revolution now firmly among us. "People should look at the ongoing transformation from a prism of not how many jobs will go, but rather at the changing nature and scope of roles and tasks. We should be optimistic that there would be many new jobs created partly through the fact that technology would enable us to do things we could not previously do." Dr Hayaatun Sillem, Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering, says the broader societal changes we are witnessing make it a "very interesting time" for engineers.Calum McCarron Looking at the size of the opportunity in a global context, engineers are not only among those feeling the first effects of Industry 4.0 but are also the drivers of a shift towards a technologically astute low carbon economy, she adds.

If you want to see some of the stuff that Tay tweeted, head over here (warning; some of her tweets make Donald Trump look tame). Tay's introduction by Microsoft was not just an attempt to build an AI that learnt from human interactions, but also one that potentially enriched Microsoft's brand and was designed also to harvest users information such as gender, location/zip codes, favourite foods, and so on (as was the Microsoft Age guessing software of last year). It harvested user interactions alright, but after a group of trolls launched a sustained, coordinated effort to influence Tay, the AI did exactly what Microsoft designed it to do -- it adapted to the language of it's so-called peers. Tay appears to have accomplished an analogous feat, except that instead of processing reams of Go data she mainlined interactions on Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe. She had more negative social experiences between Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning than a thousand of us do throughout puberty. It was peer pressure on uppers, "yes and" gone mad. No wonder she turned out the way she did. I've Seen the Greatest A.I. Minds of My Generation Destroyed by Twitter, New Yorker article, March 25th, 2016 Tay is a lesson to us in the burgeoning age of AI. Teaching Artificial Intelligences is not only about deep learning capability, but significantly about the data these AIs will consume, and not all data is good data.

From the time he was a small boy, Lei Jun strived to get close to technology. But in the rural China of the early 1980s, his teacher father's monthly salary of $7 put a $2,000 Apple II far out of reach. So Lei devised elaborate ways to fiddle with anything high-tech. He would wait for hours outside his school's tiny computer lab, hoping to sneak in when a classmate missed his allotted turn. He took odd programing jobs–once working 72 hours straight without sleep–just to use a client's PC. "I even drew a keyboard on a sheet of paper and spent classes secretly practicing typing, so I could use my time at the computer more efficiently," Lei says.

From the lofty (DeepMind applying AI to improve the NHS), to the mundane ("Alexa, put Love Island on") it's got a role to play in every area of our lives. While the classic refrain focuses on how jobs will be lost to the robots, it's not all doom and gloom for the human race explains Jason Hill, financial services expert at PA Consulting. AI may take over repetitive, data intensive, low value work, but there are challenges (and opportunities) that will always need a human brain to act on. So, the future is likely to be a blend of people and technology – teams of people and AI working together to help the financial industry ride with gusto into the future. Banking leaders will need to evolve the way they look at resourcing. They must be able to distribute responsibility and tasks to both humans and AI, understanding the strengths of each approach, while meeting people's short and long-term aspirations.

For many Americans, taking prescription pills is a part of a never-ending routine. About seven out of ten people take at least one drug, according to the Mayo Clinic, and as many as 15 percent take five or more. The trouble is, it's difficult to predict the side effects that might result from polypharmacy, or the practice of combining drugs; by some estimates, there are more than 125 billion potential complications. "It's practically impossible to test a new drug in combination with all other drugs, because just for one drug that would be five thousand new experiments," Marinka Zitnik, a postdoctoral fellow in computer science at Stanford, said. "[T]ruly, we don't know what will happen."

This is the tech news you need to know this Thursday. News of this deal comes just four months after President Trump blocked Broadcom from acquiring chipmaker Qualcomm in a $103 billion hostile takeover on national security grounds. The new terms give Facebook explicit permission to audit developers' use of data, in what looks an effort to prevent a second Cambridge Analytica-style scandal. Musk was responding to a Twitter user who said he had been told Musk wouldn't be able to help bring clean water to Flint. According to an excerpt of the account in Vanity Fair, employees feared Brin's behaviour would lead to a sexual harassment lawsuit.

Elon Musk has been goaded into using his vast amount of wealth to fix Flint's water problems. The SpaceX and Tesla boss has been criticised in recent days for the nature of his attempts to help with the rescue of the Thai boys from a cave, during which he built a submarine that was rejected by the leaders of the rescue operation. Many people that argued that the billionaire could use his huge wealth more effectively, by paying for civil or charitable projects. And one of those people has now successfully called out Mr Musk and made him commit to helping out with problems at home. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.