Enfield Council in north London is trialling a virtual assistant called Amelia to improve the online digital service experience for users and also to reduce the workload of staff within the organisation. The council's head of digital delivery, Tim Kidd, believes this kind of AI-led approach will, in time, be rolled out for services in local government across the country. Speaking with Computerworld UK, Kidd says he "absolutely" expects AI to take off in the public sector and local government. "How quickly is a separate matter, but absolutely in the long run these sorts of technologies will become mainstream in our services," he asserts. The council worked closely with Amelia's engineers at IPSoft so that the organisation can feed information about its processes directly into the AI.

As robotic technologies continue to advance, along with related technologies such as speech and image recognition, memory and analytics, and virtual and augmented reality, better, faster, and cheaper robots will emerge. These machines – sophisticated, discerning, and increasingly autonomous – are certain to have an impact on business and society. But will they bring job displacement and danger or create new categories of employment and protect humankind? We talked to SAP's Kai Goerlich, along with Doug Stephen of the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition and Brett Kennedy from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, about the advances we can expect in robotics, robots' limitations, and their likely impact on the world. Kai Goerlich: Several trends will come together to drive the robotics market in the next 15 to 20 years.

In his quest to transform the way the Pentagon wages war, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter has turned to Silicon Valley, hoping its experimental culture, innovation and sense of urgency would rub off on the rigid bureaucracy he runs. Carter has made several trips to the Valley and appointed Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google's parent company to an advisory board. And recently he sat down at the Pentagon with Elon Musk to see what suggestions the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX might have to make the nation's military more efficient and daring. "Having an incentive structure that rewards innovation is extremely important," he said in an interview after the meeting. Whatever you reward will happen." The Pentagon finds itself in a new arms race, struggling to keep pace with forms of combat that are fought with bytes as well as bullets. The technological advancements disrupting established business sectors are now shaking up the world of war -- where robots, swarming drones ...

Pinchas Gutter goes out of his way to find me biscuits. In a sun-baked living room in his north London home, he opens a packet of Rich Tea, sits down and tells me about the Holocaust. Gutter was seven years old when the second world war broke out. He lived in the Warsaw ghetto for three and a half years, took part in its uprising, survived six Nazi concentration camps – including the Majdanek extermination camp – and lived through a death march across Germany to Theresienstadt in occupied Czechoslovakia. "Remembrance is the secret of redemption, while forgetting leads to exile," he says, quoting Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism.

New technology could lead humans to relinquish control over decisions to use lethal force. As artificial intelligence advances, the possibility that machines could independently select and fire on targets is fast approaching. Fully autonomous weapons, also known as "killer robots," are quickly moving from the realm of science fiction toward reality. The unmanned Sea Hunter gets underway. At present it sails without weapons, but it exemplifies the move toward greater autonomy.

The traditional definition of artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to execute tasks and solve problems in ways normally attributed to humans. Some tasks that we consider simple--recognizing an object in a photo, driving a car--are incredibly complex for AI. Machines can surpass us when it comes to things like playing chess, but those machines are limited by the manual nature of their programming; a 30 gadget can beat us at a board game, but it can't do--or learn to do--anything else. This is where machine learning comes in. Show millions of cat photos to a machine, and it will hone its algorithms to improve at recognizing pictures of cats.

Roger Schank, an experienced computer and cognitive scientist with long experience in artificial intelligence research, is continually offended when media present simple tools like chatbots as examples of AI. "Key word analysis that enables responses previously written by people to be found and printed out, is not AI," as Schank sees it. And he complains, "We are in a situation where machine learning is not about learning at all, but about massive matching capabilities to produce canned responses." Schank worries that a bubble of hype about AI will lead, as it has in the past, to an "AI winter" -- when disillusionment from unfulfilled expectations causes interest and research funding in AI to dry up. Given the breadth of investment now in business, military, and consumer AI applications, perhaps this time may be different. Which is not a minor problem.

The trend is clearly visible: Sensors, and actuators, together with computation, memory and communication capabilities, are making all the objects around us smarter and smarter. Too many times, whether we call them robots or AIs, the trend is depicted in menacing tones, represented in the dystopian futures preferred by Hollywood movies, and shape the gut reactions of policymakers eager to please the reactionary impulses of their electorates. But smart machines are our allies, and the war is not against them but against the dumb machines that allow us to use them badly. More than a million people each year are killed by the dumbest of all machines--the car. Fifty million each year are disabled at various degrees, many permanently.

New technology could lead humans to relinquish control over decisions to use lethal force. As artificial intelligence advances, the possibility that machines could independently select and fire on targets is fast approaching. Fully autonomous weapons, also known as'killer robots,' are quickly moving from the realm of science fiction toward reality. As artificial intelligence advances, the possibility that machines could independently select and fire on targets is fast approaching. Fully autonomous weapons, also known as'killer robots,' are quickly moving from the realm of science fiction( like the plot of Terminator) toward reality Researchers explain that machines would make life-and-death determinations outside of human control.

Popular search engines are great at finding answers for point-of-fact questions like the elevation of Mount Everest or current movies running at local theaters. They are not, however, very good at answering what-if or predictive questions--questions that depend on multiple variables, such as "What influences the stock market?" In many cases that shortcoming is not for lack of relevant data. Rather, what's missing are empirical models of complex processes that influence the behavior and impact of those data elements. In a world in which scientists, policymakers and others are awash in data, the inability to construct reliable models that can deliver insights from that raw information has become an acute limitation for planners.