Here's the strange thing about where I live: When I walk outside my office, down to busy, honk-filled four-lane road that runs by it, I'm immediately part of a wide scale science experiment. A lot of us are, here in San Francisco, in metro Phoenix, Arizona, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We didn't sign any forms or cast any votes, but here we are, in a living lab for self-driving tech. This really could be the way to stop the deaths of 40,000 people on US roads every year. The blind, the old, those who can't operate vehicles--their lives might shift wholly in a world where vehicles drive themselves.

On the roads, the autonomous age is moving from the future into the present. Cars that can drive themselves have already logged millions of miles, but with a driver poised to take over if needed. Waymo, a branch of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is offering commuters in Phoenix the ability to hail a Chrysler minivan without anyone behind the wheel. Audi expects to begin selling a version of its A8 sedan that can take over completely in traffic jams and similar situations. And next year, General Motors Co. has promised to put robot taxis into service.

Amazon's drones could soon have a way to deal with unhappy customers who aren't happy with their deliveries. The firm has filed a patent to embed sensors in its drones that could react to voice commands and hand movements. This means the UAVs could respond to people screaming, waving their hands and making frantic or rude gestures during a delivery. Based on customer reactions, the drones could release the package, change their flight path or ask the human down below a question about the delivery, the patent suggests. Entitled'Human interaction with unmanned aerial vehicles', the patent was issued to Amazon on 20 March by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Diagrams show the drone reading human body language with commands such as'Receive human gesture' and'access gesture database', writes Los Angeles Times.

It has been prominently foreseen that cyberattacks would progress significantly enough to manifest with minimal input and interference from humans. With the presence of fast-growing sophistications in artificial intelligence (AI), the threat posed by cyber-attacks may be nipped in the bud. According to several C-suite executives, the incessant growth of cybersecurity could imply that security measures driven by AI can become the main source of income and living for many organizations in the years to come. With this, adaptive skills of AI can be expected to form the base for the next step in cybersecurity. Despite the availability of automation systems driven by AI in the last few years, the penetration of the technology into the security space remains largely marginal, confirming that simulated cyber penetration testing is run majorly by the users. It is predicted that by the year 2020, close to about 10 percent of all cyberattack penetrations would be incepted by machines that are driven by AI and that they will work in a manner mimicking real-life hackers.

Manchester was the world's first industrial city. It is the birthplace of the modern computer, and has the birthright for Graphene. Manchester is a product of the first industrial revolution, home of the third industrial revolution and now marks the time for it to be the focus of the fourth industrial revolution – 4IR. The 4IR will be the transformational changes caused by Artificial Intelligence. We are already experiencing major changes in our daily lives as AI is increasingly incorporated into new products.

Sophia, the worlds most advanced humanoid released to date was granted an honorary citizenship a few months ago by Saudi Arabia. In a move that set the net flooding with awe and dismay, this act probably triggered the first step towards recognising artificial intelligence being in the room and not at door step. The UN joined to recognise Sophia as the world's first UN Innovation Champion by UNDP. While these moves were music to many, artificial intelligence is raising a lot of divided opinions across the best of brains in science and technology. A quote widely in circulation on the social media on Einstein's premonition of a world having a generation of idiots may have its fair share of laughs. Einstein had indeed written a letter to his friend, psychiatrist Otto Juliusburger, in 1948 where he believed that the abominable deterioration of ethical standards stemmed primarily from the mechanisation and depersonalisation of our lives, a disastrous byproduct of science and technology.

When Stefan Kai Schaal decided to earn more money in the future, he took a leave of absence. It took the researcher more than two years to integrate his new German life seamlessly and inconspicuously into his old American life. Schaal's employer, the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, was accommodating. It granted the renowned computer scientist the sabbatical in the middle of the semester - a sabbatical he had applied for on the day he was thrown out of his home and his wife filed for divorce after nine years of marriage. That was six years ago.

Imagine thousands of "talking" drones, able to act as one to perform high-level rescue missions in the face of imminent danger. Sounds like a scene straight out of a Hollywood movie, but in a University of Pennsylvania lab, engineers have produced just that. "Swarm" drones, which can navigate on their own and coordinate with one another using sophisticated metric technology, could become the next fleet of emergency responders. These devices can function as a rescue unit to investigate an active crime scene or natural disaster – capturing images and other data that could help law enforcement plan next steps from a safe distance, said Penn researcher and team member Giuseppe Loianno. "Imagine in the case of a fire, the drones can be sent," said Loianno.

A Google model based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) that helped NASA discover two exoplanets, is now available for researchers to process data from Kepler Space Telescope. With the discovery of an eighth planet, the Kepler-90 system is the first to tie with our solar system in number of planets. The TensorFlow model decoded massive sets of data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope to discover two exoplanets last year, including one that has the first known eight-planet system like ours. One of the two newly-discovered planets is Kepler-90i -- a sizzling hot, rocky planet that orbits its star once every 14.4 days. This marked the discovery of an eighth planet circling Kepler-90, a Sun-like star 2,545 light-years from Earth -- making it the first known eight-planet system outside of our own.

The ethics of artificial intelligence will be critical to the success of AI going forward, a Microsoft leader and a keynote speaker at the AI Day event in Auckland next week says. Steve Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of Microsoft's AI Business, says that given AI has the potential to reshape not just industries and governments, but society as a whole. "Working on the ethics of the use of AI, from the beginning, in key areas like transparency, accountability, privacy and bias will be crucial to the success of AI going forward. "There is a strong focus on the ethical implications of the AI systems that are being built and deployed." The European Commission's group on ethics in science and new technologies recently warned that existing efforts to develop solutions to the ethical, societal and legal challenges AI presents are a'patchwork of disparate initiatives'. It added that uncoordinated, unbalanced approaches in the regulation of AI risked ethics shopping, resulting in the relocation of AI development and use to regions with lower ethical standards. AI Day on March 28 is being organised by NewZealand.AI and the AI Forum NZ, which is part of the NZTech Alliance, bringing together 14 national tech communities, more than 500 organisations and more than 100,000 employees to help create a more prosperous New Zealand underpinned by technology. Guggenheimer says one important element around the adoption of AI is the focus on having AI help to amplify human capabilities and allow them to do more versus simply replacing people and functions. "As AI is adopted by various organisations we are starting to see a few trends occurring.