Robots are taking over your job…and there's nothing you can do. By Amro Zakaria Abdu Human advancement throughout history can largely be credited to our ability to invent machines that increase our productivity and efficiency. Those tools allowed us to overcome the physical limitations of the human body and that of the animals we used, and as a result, territories were conquered, societies reshaped, and the dream of economic prosperity became a reality for millions. At the turn of the 19th century, the U.S. was a nation of farmers--39 percent of the population earned their livelihood through farming. The tractor was then introduced, resulting in profound changes such as the total replacement of work animals, consolidation of farms as seen in the increase in the average farm size from 60 to 200 hectares by the 1940's. Furthermore, the percentage of the population working in farming dropped to under 2 percent by the end of the century.

Upfront, he let the reporters and editors in the room know he thought their reporting has been unfair to him. During the wide-ranging conversation, Trump denounced Nazi celebrations in Washington, D.C., offered Jared Kushner as a peace-broker between Israel and Palestine, promised to stay open-minded about the Paris climate-change accord, and mused that prosecuting the Clintons would be a nationally divisive move. He also stood by his appointment of Steve Bannon, saying that had he thought Bannon were racist he wouldn't have hired him. The new feature is an expansion of its "popular times" product. There are currently 32.9 million millionaires.

Intel CEO, Brian Krzanich, announced that Intel Capital will invest $250m in the next two years in the autonomous vehicle (AV) ecosystem, focused on problems in connectivity, communication, context awareness, deep learning, security and safety. When viewed in the context of the fund's short-lived intention to sell $1bn worth of portfolio holdings in March this year (it was cancelled in May), I think this shows Intel is serious on going long with AI. Indeed, the company purchased recently Nervana Systems and Movidius, which could help it's larger AV program and the race against NVIDIA. Nauto, the startup offering a direct to consumer network of cloud-connected dashboard cameras applied to car insurance, inked a data sharing agreement and investment from Toyota Research Institute, BMW iVentures and Allianz Ventures (thanks Moritz for sharing!). One of the reasons for the immense progress in AI is data crowdsourcing.

It's been five years since NASA ended the Spirit rover's mission, but now, researchers say the robot may have discovered traces of life during its Mars investigation. A team of geoscientists has discovered that silica deposits from a region on the red planet dubbed'Home Plate' closely resemble those that form in Chilean hot springs at El Tatio. On Earth, these complex finger-like structures arise from a combination of biological and non-biological activity, suggesting a similar process may have taken place on Mars. The researchers compared opaline silica structures found at Home Plate (on left) with those from hot spring discharge channels at El Tatio (on right). The silica deposits on Mars were discovered after Spirit's right front wheel failed in 2007, forcing the robot to drag it across the ground like a plow near Home Plate, an eroded deposit of volcanic ash.

One of the most popular acronyms of the decade - IoT actually stands for Internet of Things but due to the rising cyber crime cases in the past few years, many are decoding it as Internet of Threats. Cybersecurity Ventures, a pioneer organisation in the field of internet security, claims that cyber crime is going to increase the world expenses up to 6 trillion USD annually by 2021. Today, hackers are not only targeting the corporate data, but they are also threats to the security of various countries. Recently, they managed to steal the details of a deal between the Indian Navy and French submarine maker'DCNS' even before the deployment of Scorpène submarines. How Pandemic is IoT Threats From financial institutions to defence research agencies all are under the radar of malicious hackers and spies.

A few weeks ago I posted a map of the Artificial Intelligence landscape in Ireland. The map is a visual representation of resident Irish companies in the A.I. space. I decided to go a step further and put together an overview of the Irish Artificial Intelligence industry. I used the companies on the map to form the basis of the findings covered in this blog. I use the phrase'Artificial Intelligence' as an umbrella term to categorise the industry.

Passengers embark on the U.S. side of the last hand-pulled ferry at Los Ebanos, Texas on the Mexico-U.S. border in 2008. LOS EBANOS, Texas -- All along the winding Rio Grande, the people who live in this bustling, fertile region where the U.S. border meets the Gulf of Mexico never quite understood how Donald Trump's great wall could ever be much more than campaign rhetoric. Erecting a concrete barrier across the entire 1,954-mile frontier with Mexico, they know, collides head-on with multiple realities: the geology of the river valley, fierce local resistance and the immense cost. An electronically fortified "virtual wall" with surveillance technology that includes night-and-day video cameras, tethered observation balloons and high-flying drones makes a lot more sense to people here. If a 30- to 40-foot concrete wall is a panacea for illegal immigration, as Trump insisted during the campaign, the locals are not convinced.

AI is expected to bring massive shifts in how people perceive and interact with technology, with machines performing a wider range of tasks, in many cases doing a better job than humans. That's the finding of a new report from Tractica which also outlines what the authors say will be the top tend trends in AI implementations next year. The report's authors say, the majority of use cases they studied take existing processes like predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, algorithmic trading, customer service, search engine queries, or cybersecurity threat detection and apply machine learning techniques or other AI techniques that can adapt rules and provide better results than previous static rule techniques. "At the same time, AI is also enabling new capabilities like image classification or natural language understanding, which are being plugged into photo storage solutions, or into virtual digital assistants (VDAs). The majority of the new capabilities around vision and language are new, and are being offered as incremental improvements to consumer products and services using a freemium model, rather than creating new disruptive business models."

Google has agreed a five-year deal with one of the largest NHS trusts to handle the medical records of up to 1.6million people. The tech giant's secretive DeepMind health business will use the data to help develop a mobile app they claim could save 10,000 lives a year. In 2017 it will launch a warning system for acute kidney problems and blood poisoning at three London hospitals, although its'Streams' app will also include test results, medical history and an instant messaging service. But it is hugely controversial because the Royal Free London NHS Trust has agreed that DeepMind needs to be given all patient data to make it work. This is believed to include patients' names, ages, and complete medical histories, including whether they had been diagnosed with HIV, depression, suffered from drug or alcohol addiction, or had an abortion.

Would you trust an artificial intelligence to fly an armed combat jet? Software called ALPHA is being used to fly uncrewed jets in simulations and could one day help pilots in real-world missions. ALPHA's developers claim, that unlike many AI systems, its behaviour can be verified at each step, meaning it won't act unpredictably. ALPHA was developed by Psibernetix in Ohio as a training aid for the US air force. It was originally designed to fly aircraft in a virtual air combat simulator, but has now been turned into a friendly co-pilot system that can help human pilots using the simulator.