Technologies including AI, bots, drones and robots will lead to the automation of large parts of the global workforce More than 861,000 public sector jobs could be lost by 2030 through automation, according to a study that comes as a further blow after hundreds of thousands of UK public sector jobs disappeared following the government's austerity cuts during and after the recession. However, it has to be said, that as more and more governments around the world experiment with Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs, including Scotland who may even start trails next week, the news doesn't come as a complete surprise. The research conducted by Oxford University and Deloitte, the business advisory firm, found that the 1.3m administrative jobs across the public sector had the highest chance of being automated. But, following on from the London Borough of Enfields move to replace some customer services clerks with a bot called "Amelia," even teachers, police officers and social workers could be replaced, at least in part, allowing the government to either free up more staff for frontline work or reduce the number of workers on the payroll. The research is included in Deloitte's State of the State report, which analyses the state of public finances and the challenges facing public services. Deloitte's previous work has shown that all sectors will be affected by automation in the next two decades, with 74% of jobs in transportation and storage, 59% in wholesale and retail trades and 56% in manufacturing having a high chance of being automated.

Way back in 1969, as a kid, I watched a very interesting movie - "2001: A Space Odyssey." It was a science fiction where a super intelligent computer program HAL is in charge of a mission to Jupiter which also carries several astronauts. The program becomes rogue and tries to kill all the astronauts. The hero survives and manages to disable the program. There is a lot more to the plot, but the fight between human and computer is still vivid in my memory. In 1969, such a scenario looked possible. After all 32 years is a lot of time given the rate of our progress. We are now in 2016, and it appears that something similar may happen in the next 32 years. Even the experts have been predicting that Artificial Intelligence or AI will happen in next 20 years. The irony is that this prediction is being made for more than 60 years now!

A London NHS hospital trust has teamed up with tech giant Google to share patient data so it can save more lives. Doctors at the Royal Free say partnering with the artificial intelligence arm of Google - DeepMind - could free up over half a million hours per year, currently spent on paperwork, towards direct patient care. Medical staff will get'breaking news' style alerts about their patients. Privacy campaigners are concerned about data breaches. Information on more than 1.6 million patients a year will be shared with a subsidiary of Google.

Robots have become commonplace in many aspects of life including health care, military and security work. Yet until recently little thought has been given outside of academic circles to the ethics of robots. Silicon Valley Robotics recently launched a Good Robot Design Council -- which has launched "5 Laws of Robotics" guidelines for roboticists and academics -- on the ethical creation, marketing and use of robots in everyday life. Robots should comply with existing law, including privacy. Robots are products; they should be safe, reliable and not misrepresent their capabilities.

A country's dexterity with artificial intelligence technology might be the next strong source of national pride and international power. Knowing it would lay the foundation for the future of medicine, IBM captured the world's imagination in 2011 with Watson, a supercomputer that not only won Jeopardy!, but beat trivia superstar Ken Jennings in the process. The novel cognitive computing technology was quickly adapted to "read" the thousands of medical research papers published weekly in order to diagnose cancer patients more accurately than human doctors seemingly could. It's a banner technology for IBM, a company that remains no slouch in its 105 years of operation Now five years after Watson's debut, Japanese researchers at Kyoto University and Fujitsu are collaborating to build their own computing technology that's fairly characterized as a response to Watson. Skipping the game shows and going straight to medical applications, the Japanese system aims to close the gap in understanding how our genes determine our health by accounting for a patient's genetic code in its computer-generated diagnoses.

Last month both the UK and US governments published reports on how artificial intelligence (AI) and automation will impact society in the coming years. It was landmark moment, thrusting AI into national and political conversations. At the same time Stephen Hawking, the renowned theoretical physicist, called AI the greatest threat in human history. While the government reports acknowledge a danger – mainly surrounding job loss and ethical issues – it is not the Skynet scenario Hawking implied with his speech. However, both he and the government reports believe AI and automation, if monitored closely, will transform not only business operations but the world as we know it.

Technology is a big part of healthcare. In a 2014 McKinsey survey, more than 75% of patients polled said that they would like to use digital healthcare services, as long as those services meet their needs and provide the level of quality they expect. And yet the healthcare industry lags behind every other sector when it comes to implementing technology. HIPAA Journal writes, "In some cases, the new technology now being introduced by healthcare providers was first introduced in other industry sectors many years ago." A break in that trend has come from the surge of wearable devices. Getting beyond counting strides and counting calories, the healthcare industry has seen tremendous growth in wearable and wireless technologies that can monitor serious diseases.

Five questions to prove you're a natural codebreaker Image caption Not all computer scientists look like this. But it's fine if you do The National College of Cybersecurity is opening in 2018 for "gifted and talented" problem solvers. The training centre will help build a "talent pool" for Britain's future cyber-defences. It's being developed at Bletchley Park, in Buckinghamshire, the site of secret code-deciphering which helped the Allies win World War Two. Code is the language in which computer programs, apps and websites are written. Anisah Osman Britton, 23, is the founder of 23 Code Street, a coding school for women.

It may take several years or even decades, but hackers won't necessarily always be human. Artificial intelligence -- a technology that also promises to revolutionize cybersecurity -- could one day become the go-to hacking tool. Organizers of the Cyber Grand Challenge, a contest sponsored by the U.S. defense agency DARPA, gave a glimpse of the power of AI during their August event. Seven supercomputers battled each other to show that machines can indeed find and patch software vulnerabilities. Theoretically, the technology can be used to perfect any coding, ridding it of exploitable flaws.

Tens of thousands of people are calling on Parliament to recall the "most extreme spying powers ever seen". The Investigatory Powers Bill was just passed through the House of Lords and so is now just weeks away from becoming law. But signatories to a new petition hope that process can be stopped, forcing lawmakers to keep the new powers from being published. The new law forces internet companies to keep a full browsing history of all of their users and give it up to a huge range of government agencies if they are asked. It also gives spies unprecedented powers to read people's messages, as well as forcing technology companies like Apple to hack into their own phones if they are asked.