Before long, the only things that will be required of you when you get in a car are to turn it on and to set a destination. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) operate with LIDAR, a system that uses a laser light beam to map its surrounding environment and to detect other moving objects (cars, pedestrians, bicyclists, etc). Add some powerful computers and artificial intelligence and AVs will chauffeur you safely from point A to B. Just imagine: your car is driving you down the highway as you're lost in conversation with friends. Every car around you is filled with people doing the same, happily lost in the moment. Your favorite song comes on shuffle and you all start singing along loudly enough that you don't hear the buzz of a small drone as it passes by overhead.

In our fourth installment of the Bytes Chat, we convened a panel of economists to discuss the newly released NBER study on the impact of robots on jobs and wages. Bytes contributors Rob Seamans, associate professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, Bret Swanson, president of Entropy Economics, and Hal Singer, senior fellow at George Washington University's Institute of Public Policy were joined by special guest Marshall Steinbaum, senior economist and fellow of the Roosevelt Institute. The conversation has been edited slightly for readability. First question is at the behest of our president. Are the robots coming over the border? Is this a border problem? Marshall Steinbaum: If you get all the enemies in one place, it's easier to kill them. Singer: Ok, let's get serious.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said Sunday that people "should be marching in the streets" to demand changes to "antiquated" education systems that aren't preparing students to be competitive in the job market against the robots of the future. "The looming challenge of automation and artificial intelligence and the rapid advancement of technology brings great benefits but also creates huge challenges," Bush told radio host John Catsimatidis on AM 970 in New York. The threat of a number of jobs being lost to automation is "real," he said. "This is not something that's science fiction. This is happening as we speak. And yet we still have this big skills gap."

The Navy wants soldiers who can concentrate better and learn faster, and it's looking at a controversial piece of tech to do that: transcranial electrical stimulation. It has been testing a passive brain-stimulating device from Halo Neuroscience with "a small group of volunteers" from Seal Team Six, the group that killed Osama Bin Laden, and other units, according to Military.com. "Early results show promising signs," said spokesman Capt. The $749 Halo Neuroscience headset (below) looks a lot like regular headphones, and does actually play music. However, it also has silicon spikes on the band called "neuroprimers" that contact a wearer's head.

U.S. education systems must prepare students to compete with robots in the future's job market, warns Jeb Bush. The former Florida governor told AM 970's John Catsimatidis: 'This is not something that's science fiction. This is happening as we speak. The failed 2016 Republican presidential candidate said: 'The looming challenge of automation and artificial intelligence and the rapid advancement of technology brings great benefits but also creates huge challenges.' Jeb Bush, pictured in September 2016, said that education in the U.S. needs an overhaul to help workers compete with robots in the future's job market The former Florida governor and failed 2016 Republican presidential candidate said: 'This is not something that's science fiction. This is happening as we speak.

Computer scientist Zachary Chase Lipton hates the term artificial intelligence, which he says gives people the wrong idea. He prefers to call it machine learning. Lipton, who used to earn his living as a musician, would be a dream example for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau, who are hoping to retrain Canada's underemployed to serve a resurgent artificial intelligence industry. But the AI whiz says retraining may not be enough to prevent a wave of social disruption when the tech economy leaves the poor and middle class behind. Lipton is not one to scoff at the opportunities offered by retraining.

Using unitary (instead of general) matrices in artificial neural networks (ANNs) is a promising way to solve the gradient explosion/vanishing problem, as well as to enable ANNs to learn long-term correlations in the data. This approach appears particularly promising for Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). In this work, we present a new architecture for implementing an Efficient Unitary Neural Network (EUNNs); its main advantages can be summarized as follows. Firstly, the representation capacity of the unitary space in an EUNN is fully tunable, ranging from a subspace of SU(N) to the entire unitary space. Secondly, the computational complexity for training an EUNN is merely $\mathcal{O}(1)$ per parameter. Finally, we test the performance of EUNNs on the standard copying task, the pixel-permuted MNIST digit recognition benchmark as well as the Speech Prediction Test (TIMIT). We find that our architecture significantly outperforms both other state-of-the-art unitary RNNs and the LSTM architecture, in terms of the final performance and/or the wall-clock training speed. EUNNs are thus promising alternatives to RNNs and LSTMs for a wide variety of applications.

Up to around 30% of existing UK jobs could face automation over the next 15 years, but new AI-related technologies will also boost productivity and generate additional jobs elsewhere in the economy, according to new analysis by PwC in its latest UK Economic Outlook report. This involves looking in detail at the task composition of jobs in different industry sectors and occupations, using machine learning techniques to model the potential impact of AI in the future based on OECD data. The study estimates that the UK (30%) has a lower proportion of existing jobs at potential high risk of automation than the US (38%) and Germany (35%), but more than Japan (21%). PwC's analysis finds the likely impact of automation varies significantly across industry sectors: transportation and storage (56%), manufacturing (46%) and wholesale and retail trade (44%) have the highest proportion of jobs facing potential high risks of automation among the larger sectors. Education and health and social work are estimated to face the lowest risks of automation given the relatively high proportion of tasks that are hard to automate (see table below).

Canada wants to be an artificial-intelligence hotbed.

This article is by Featured Blogger José de la Rubia from his LinkedIn page. With Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and other tech giants joining the ranks, people have given different understandings of AI from their own perspectives – with some of them being off target. There are two things companies need to be careful of, whether they are large or small. The first is to avoid any pursuit of unrealistic products that require futuristic technologies. The second is a misinterpretation of the market demand, or the quasi-demand.