Instead of new bank holidays for each of the nations of the UK to coincide with saints' days (as proposed by Labour), why not make national elections a public holiday as in many other countries? This would help to make it as easy for many people in employment to vote, as it is for people who are retired or not in work. Alternatively, voting should take place at weekends, thereby avoiding disruption to schools. Improving turnout and making the voting process just as convenient for everyone would be a step towards a healthier democracy. At what point in this progress towards robots taking over everyone's job and leaving them without employment or, more crucially, income is someone going to notice that demand is falling off so precipitously for the goods and services that the robots have been producing (because not enough people can afford them any more) that the robots themselves are becoming redundant?

When an Icelander arrives at an office building and sees'Solarfri' posted, they need no further explanation for the empty premises: The word means'when staff get an unexpected afternoon off to enjoy good weather.' The people of this rugged North Atlantic island settled by Norsemen some 1,100 years ago have a unique dialect of Old Norse that has adapted to life at the edge of the Artic. Hundslappadrifa, for example, means'heavy snowfall with large flakes occurring in calm wind.' Linguistics experts wonder if this is the beginning of the end for the Icelandic tongue. Salome Sigurjonsdottir, 10, tests a voice-controlled television in an electronics store in Reykjavik. Linguistics experts, studying the future of a language spoken by fewer than 400,000 people in an increasingly globalized world, wonder if this is the beginning of the end for the Icelandic tongue.

It's the classic ABCs of business -- Always Be Computing. The CEO of Asia's largest ecommerce company said at a conference in China over the weekend he believes that we're just a few decades away from having robots run our companies. SEE ALSO: Bill Gates: There should be a'robot tax' on the machines that take your jobs "In 30 years, a robot will likely be on the cover of Time Magazine as the best CEO," said Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba, according to a CNN report. First of all, good news for Time that they're going to be around in 30 years. Did not see that coming.

Captioning your Instagrams is one of the biggest struggles of the digital realm. Instead of coming up with something witty, smart and zeitgeisty every time, we're left racking our brains for something, anything to say about our thirst trap selfies and holiday snaps. But this app could end all your caption deliberation woes. The app -- called Rubric -- analyses your Instagram photos using visual recognition technology and generates a selection of relevant captions. SEE ALSO: The Instagram'pods' using likes to fight the new algorithm Rubric founder Amber Atherton explains that the app scrapes trending words from social and Urban Dictionary while also linking in Rap Genius' API.

The artificial intelligence that we hope will exist in our lifetime is a world away from what's available right now. A thinking computer that knows us better than we know ourselves, and can make us better than we are, is still the stuff of fantasy. But, if our goals are simple and easy to understand, does an AI really need to be that smart to get the job done? It's a question that I've been musing ever since I started testing Vi, which its creators call the "first true AI personal trainer." It combines a pair of bio-sensing headphones and app from Lifebeam, a military biosensor firm founded by a pair of former Israeli air force pilots.

In a time of "America First," the benefits of space travel are clouded by the smoke of hyperbole. In reality, there has been over 2,000 inventions courtesy of NASA that are making our lives better here on Earth. Every day, we benefit as much from the journey as from the destination. These innovations include new medicines developed in zero gravity; faster autonomous transportation technologies; and groundbreaking advances in computing (launched above the clouds). The map below illustrates the number of commercial endeavors that have spun out of the nation's space program since 1976: NASA has been an incubator of technology since its inception in 1959. This year, NASA unveiled a new web page illustrating its reach into the design of new smart cities and IoT connected homes, called NASA City.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. The Trump administration's efforts to impose new immigration rules drew attention -- and legal fire -- for its restrictions on the ability of people born in certain majority Muslim countries to enter the U.S. In the frenzy of concern, an obscure piece of the executive orders did not get scrutinized, or even noticed, very much: its expansion of facial recognition systems in major U.S. airports to monitor people leaving the U.S., in hopes of catching people who have overstayed their visas or are wanted in criminal investigations. It's a much more powerful version of the method your phone or computer might use to identify friends in your photos. Using computers to recognize people's faces and validate their identities can streamline access control for secure corporate and government buildings or devices. Some systems can identify known or suspected criminals.

Jobs that design automation to manipulate human behavior. That's five classes of jobs that will exist in the future that appears to be safe. Paying someone for a job other than these will likely be illegal. On the other hand, with the exception of the "human safety valve", all these other jobs require high level skills. Jobs of the future need to have an deep understanding of humans as well as machines, and it is in this interaction of man with machine where jobs will exist. I think what few seem to appreciate is that Deep Learning AI is technology that is like human intuition. It is an opposite technology from more classical AI technologies that focused on reasoning. At this time there remains a Semantic Gap. However, humans capabilities are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

The emerging wave of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) is expected to bring about a significant shift in the factors of production in the global economy. There is now a high degree of agreement that a significantly large number of workers in several sectors will become redundant. It is, therefore, important to swiftly implement the palliative measures which can neutralise the impact of the new age technologies. Before thinking upon the required measures for addressing the expected rise in unemployment, let us imagine the likely characteristics of this emerging landscape. The positive development is that increased usage of new technology will lead to an increase in productivity in most sectors. To illustrate, a doctor or a banker will be able to examine much higher number of patients or clients by delegating the standard aspects to tech-enabled systems.

Many new computer devices do not understand Icelandic, a unique descendant of the Old Norse language filled with ultra-descriptive words such as Hundslappadrifa, or "heavy snowfall with large flakes occurring in calm wind." This omission is compounding a bigger issue on the North Atlantic island of about 340,000 people. SEE ALSO: Companies will have to prove equal pay in Iceland now, and it's pretty great Icelandic, seen by residents as a source of identity and pride, is losing ground as English becomes the lingua franca of mass tourism and voice-activated devices, the Associated Press reported. Linguistic experts have warned the language is at risk of dying out in the modern world, particularly as tourism booms and foreign workers find more jobs on the rugged island. Unless the government, educators, families, and tech developers make a concerted effort to preserve Icelandic, it could easily be relegated to history books.