It's the question on everyone's mind when reading Siddhartha Mukherjee's article in the New Yorker "AI vs MD", which pits human doctors against computers. It's a beautifully composed summary on the role of software algorithms in healthcare, examining the issue through the most controversial lens. Perhaps some radiologists read it and had an existential crisis. Surely some machine learning Ph.D.s read it and rolled their eyes with the gross simplicity with which deep learning was described. It's a shocking and provocative concept for any reader of The New Yorker – doctors are the best and brightest among us, even they could be outsmarted by a machine?

Robots and artificial intelligence were once just the stuff of Hollywood fantasy, from the Star Wars and Terminator movies to Iron Man's JARVIS butler. However, intelligent machines that can simulate reasoning and develop knowledge to mimic human thought processes are now part of the real world -- and with that comes the risk of bias and cyber attack. Investment in artificial intelligence (AI) in the U.S. more than doubled to $587 million last year, and machine learning is expected to drive an increase in the use of robotics and software automation in coming years. AI algorithms are already used in investment, healthcare, programming, law, music, book and film recommendation services, games, and language learning -- to name but a few sectors. These uses often produce outcomes that would be unattainable by humans or do so at a far lower cost.

The US is considering expanding its electronics ban to all flights departing UK and European airports, according to a new report. Passengers travelling to the US would not be able to board a US-bound plane carrying any electronics larger than a mobile phone. Laptops, tablets and cameras would instead need to be checked-in ahead of flights and stored in the cargo hold. 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. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

A version of this article appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of strategy business. On the Stanford University campus, you could practically throw a rock and hit 100 graduate students who are building apps that enable people to communicate more effectively. But Terry Winograd is particularly enthusiastic about the app one of his graduate students, Catalin Voss, is working on. Voss, a native of Germany who completed his bachelor's and master's degrees last June at the age of 21, is working on an app that deploys Google Glass, linked to a smartphone, to help autistic children recognize human emotions through facial expressions. Venture capitalists weren't interested, even though Voss had created and sold a startup that used eye-tracking technology to monitor attentiveness to a Toyota subsidiary while still a freshman. But Terry Winograd was interested. "It runs, it has AI [artificial intelligence]," says Winograd, who 20-odd years ago advised another graduate student on the then nascent field of searching the World Wide Web. "It's at a stage where we've actually put 30 devices into homes. Our goal is to have 100 in the trial." Voss says his objective is to build a medical product that insurers will be willing to pay for. "We want to prove the investors wrong, who didn't believe in it, and build an aid for people with autism, and other mental disorders as well," he says. "We believe we've built a fairly holistic system for mental health."

The healthcare sector is one of those sectors that has always embraced emerging technologies to make better use of technological innovations. And now artificial intelligence (AI) is gradually making its way into the healthcare market with all its power to disrupt. The annual investment in artificial intelligence for healthcare will grow tenfold in the next five years, becoming a $6-billion industry by 2021 – estimates Frost & Sullivan. They have also forecasted that by 2025, AI systems could be involved in everything from population health management to digital avatars capable of answering specific patient queries. In healthcare, the opportunity for AI is not just limited to making doctors and medical providers more competent in their work; in fact, it's about saving lives and making the lives of the patients better.

If you haven't heard (maybe you've been toiling in Elon's tunnels?), Uber has had a rough start to 2017. The Department of Justice just launched a criminal probe into the company's use of "Greyball," a system it used to identify regulatory officials and block them from booking rides. In January, it lost riders who objected to CEO Travis Kalanick's (soon abandoned) seat on President Trump's economic council. In late February, former Uber engineer Susan Fowler published an explosive blog post, accusing Uber of fostering a misogynistic corporate culture. A few days later, Google autonomous driving spinoff Waymo filed a lawsuit alleging Uber boosted its self-driving program by stealing its trade secrets.

What does the public sector of the future look like? Ken McGrath, head of Government at eir Business, looks at the rise of AI and robotics in the public sector and the benefits and challenges that presents. There's no doubt that recent reporting on robots and the future has ushered in a little bit of hysteria about said robots stealing our jobs and replacing humans in certain roles. What most people don't realise is that robots are already all around us; just because a supermarket's self-service checkout doesn't have eyes, doesn't make it any less of a robot. They're already embedded in organisations across Ireland and the world, helping them to work smarter and more efficiently. In the University of Limerick, for example, robotic assisted surgery is in full swing.

In the wake of terrorist attacks like those in Paris and Orlando, Fla., domestic and international law enforcement agencies alike are investigating how attackers were able to slip through intelligence-gathering networks and what can be done to prevent future attacks. Big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies offer federal, state and local law enforcement agencies the opportunity to predict the probability of terror attacks based on many factors, according to David Rubal, DLT Solutions' chief technologist of data and analytics and principal data scientist. A data futurist as well as a fellow at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT), Rubal said "personal, behavioral, facial recognition, geo-location, social media and financial data" can help government agencies, law enforcement groups and their technology providers make predictions. "Probability and risk is determined based on the intersections of this data and patterns over time," Rubal explained. "Agencies are also using virtual reality, derived from advanced user experiences and gaming, to simulate'life-like' situations for law enforcement to improve predictability and situational awareness when training officers for responding to a terrorist threat," Rubal said.

Headlines about mass data breaches have become ominously routine, and yet password convenience still trumps security for most people. That's why, year after year, the world's most popular log-on remains "123456," a password so obvious it accounted for 17 percent of the 10 million compromised passwords analyzed by Keeper Security, which sells a log-in management service. The answer, of course, is to get rid of passwords altogether. Biometric technology--especially fingerprint scanners--have been steadily replacing the need to type in a password, which can easily be guessed by hackers wielding smart algorithms. Now, with the world increasingly embracing voice-activated devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, companies are starting to create technology that recognizes a person's speech patterns. Facial recognition is starting to catch on as well.

One of the complications, and opportunities, confronting the cyber security industry is that the cyber threat may be escalating beyond the capacity of a human-centric response. Consider for instance the remarks of the outgoing chief of the Department of Defense, that "given the volume [of attacks] and where I see the threat moving it will be impossible for humans by themselves to keep pace." The DoD currently finds itself amidst a $1.6 billion project of centralizing its hundreds of separate firewalls into a unified system, the end purpose being to enable effective integration of artificial intelligence capabilities. While this DoD example is an isolated one, it nonetheless epitomizes the human limitation in countering the cyber threat, which is primarily a digitalized, computer-driven hazard. As Benedict Cumberbatch playing Alan Turing in The Imitation Game quipped, "our problem is that we're trying to beat [enigma] with men. What if only a machine can defeat another machine?"