Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company's popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination. Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post. First, he compared a few sentences from two published versions of "The Great Gatsby," Takashi Nozaki's 1957 translation and Haruki Murakami's more recent iteration, with what this new Google Translate was able to produce. Murakami's translation is written "in very polished Japanese," Rekimoto explained to me later via email, but the prose is distinctively "Murakami-style."

The odds are high, according to recent economic analyses. Indeed, fully 47 percent of all U.S. jobs will be automated "in a decade or two," as the tech-employment scholars Carl Frey and Michael Osborne have predicted. That's because artificial intelligence and robotics are becoming so good that nearly any routine task could soon be automated. Robots and AI are already whisking products around Amazon's huge shipping centers, diagnosing lung cancer more accurately than humans and writing sports stories for newspapers. Last year in Pittsburgh, Uber put its first-ever self-driving cars into its fleet: Order an Uber and the one that rolls up might have no human hands on the wheel at all. Meanwhile, Uber's "Otto" program is installing AI in 16-wheeler trucks--a trend that could eventually replace most or all 1.7 million drivers, an enormous employment category.

Jack Clark and I are both lapsed technology journalists, and he writes one of my favorite new newsletters of this year, Import AI, which summarizes major research, hires and products in the space. He now works for OpenAI, alongside a team of researchers, where he handles policy, communications and partnerships. OpenAI is an AI research lab set up by former Stripe CTO Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman. Its mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. Q: Before you joined OpenAI, you were a journalist -- like me. In fact, you called yourself the world's first and "only neural network reporter" while you were at Bloomberg. What made you decide to cross over? I think there are three things that are going to affect the world in incredibly significant ways over the next decade and they are 1) Climate change 2) CRISPR and 3) artificial intelligence.

It's not exactly autonomous, but it works. Nissan believes the fastest way to get driverless cars on the road is to give them remote human support – and it's using NASA technology to do it. Nissan demonstrated its Seamless Autonomous Mobility (SAM) platform at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, which incorporates a degree of teleoperation into the autonomous car system. Although vehicles will be able to drive themselves most of the time, human "mobility managers" can remotely take control in unexpected situations. "Autonomy systems are not simple, it is a very hard problem," says Maarten Sierhuis, director of Nissan's Research Center in Sunnyvale, California.

He is a German computer scientist and artist known for his work on machine learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), artificial neural networks, digital physics, and low-complexity art. "We need to be super careful with artificial intelligence. It is potentially more dangerous than nukes." That was Elon Musk two years ago, on Twitter. What does it mean for a technology, when it faces serious doubts from a man who is passionate about creating a better world through innovation? Since its beginnings in the 1950s, artificial intelligence has been a favourite subject of science fiction. But now AI has entered the realm of fact: several studies predict that intelligent machines will have a big impact on how we work, how we move and even how wars are fought. Innovators and scientists around the world believe that now is the time to ensure that AI is beneficial above all for humans. And even if there are plausible reasons to be anxious about machines that could one day be more intelligent than we are, many scientists are ready to take up the challenge, as we explain in our feature on the following pages. Some people fret that artificial intelligence will end civilization as we know it. Others believe it can solve every problem.

Whenever one separates sociology and technology, one misses the point.

President-elect Trump has met with leaders in technology in an effort to open lines of communication and discuss business after months of two-way criticism. It's no secret that Silicon Valley was largely in support of Hillary Clinton, who had aligned herself with the technology community, while over the last few years Mr. Trump has criticized Apple's iPhones, accused Facebook, Google, and Twitter of burying negative news about Democrats, and picked a fight with Jeff Bezos on Twitter insinuating his purchase of the Washington Post was for political influence to help Amazon's business. While this meeting simply serves to smooth over relations with the technology community, there is a longer conversation needed with President-elect Trump, who's presidency sits at a tipping point in technology. In the next four years we will see an explosion of AI technology that further delivers on the promise of driverless cars, intelligent robots, and other societal and job-impacting advancements. The conversation needed is how to, or more precisely, how not to regulate AI.

HONG KONG: McDonald's Corp has agreed to sell the bulk of its China and Hong Kong business to state-backed conglomerate CITIC Ltd and Carlyle Group LP for up to $2.1 billion (Dh7.71 billion), seeking to expand rapidly without using much of its own capital. Zurich The Swiss National Bank expects a 2016 full-year profit of 24 billion francs (Dh86.68 billion; $23.6 billion), enabling it to shell out money to the federal government and municipalities. Foreign-currency holdings contributed more than 19 billion francs, and valuation gains on its gold holdings added 3.9 billion francs, the central bank said on Monday, citing an initial estimate. Last year's result is set to be the second-best in the Read More ... Tags: Corporate Enterprises Finance Sectors Banks Profits Financial institutions German automaker Volkswagen saw sales jump 16 percent in December for its namesake brand, propelled by a big increase in China, Volkswagen's biggest market. Global sales reported Monday rose to 567,900 from 487,700 despite the damage to the company's reputation from its scandal over cars rigged to cheat on diesel emissions tests.

Our lives are now heavily mediated by digital technology (music streaming, social media, e-banking etc). We are increasingly and often continuously online, open to engagement in a myriad of services and simultaneously open to cyberattack. We now need to defend against the lone wolf hacker, organised crime and terrorism, and nation states with well-funded advanced capabilities. The 2016 cyber message is clear – we have a big problem, it's going to get worse, and we need help. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a promising source of such help.

This is Essential Politics, our daily look at California political and government news. Rosey Grier, a legendary Los Angeles Rams player, says he's thinking about running for governor of California . Uber's effort to use self-driving cars on San Francisco streets without a permit inspires one legislator to take action . A former Los Angeles planning commissioner becomes the twelfth person to enter the race to replace Rep. Xavier Becerra. Rosey Grier, a legendary Los Angeles Rams player, says he's thinking about running for governor of California .