"One of the near-term opportunities is driven by the sheer amount of aerial and satellite data that's starting to be produced around the world," Reid agrees. "There's a fantastic company out of Christchurch called Orbica, who are specialists in what they call GeoAI – analysing geospatial data and aerial and satellite photography to extract features and effectively count the number of houses or vehicles or identify bodies of water from the air. These are things that used to take people days of manual analysis and now it can be run through an algorithm in seconds.

Over the past few years, the term "deep learning" has firmly worked its way into business language when the conversation is about Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data and analytics. And with good reason – it is an approach to AI which is showing great promise when it comes to developing the autonomous, self-teaching systems which are revolutionising many industries. Deep Learning is used by Google in its voice and image recognition algorithms, by Netflix and Amazon to decide what you want to watch or buy next, and by researchers at MIT to predict the future. The ever-growing industry which has established itself to sell these tools is always keen to talk about how revolutionary this all is. But what exactly is it?

"Machine learning is not magic," cautions Nick Cafferillo, chief data and technology officer at S&P Global. "It's about augmenting our thought processes …

Real-sounding but made-up news articles have become much easier to produce thanks to a handful of new tools powered by artificial intelligence--raising concerns about potential misuse of the technology. What deepfakes did for video--producing clips of famous people appearing to say and do things they never said or did--these tools could do for news, tricking people into thinking the earth is flat, global warming is a hoax or a political candidate committed a crime when he or she didn't. While false articles are nothing new,...

Will intelligent machines take, make, or reboot your job – how might AI transform occupations and professions across society? The robots are coming – "Lock up your knowledge and protect your job at all costs!" The apocalyptic warnings are starting to flow of how artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics combined with other disruptive technologies could eliminate the need for humans in the workplace. Equally skeptical voices are rubbishing the idea that anything drastic will happen, citing previous industrial revolutions as proof that new jobs will emerge to fill any gaps created by the automation of existing ones. In practice, no one really knows how quickly AI might eliminate jobs, or what the employment needs will be of the future businesses and industries that have not yet been born.

Actor and equality campaigner Geena Davis has announced that Disney has adopted a digital tool that will analyse scripts and identify opportunities to rectify any gender and ethnic biases. Davis, founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, was speaking at the Power of Inclusion event in New Zealand, where she outlined the development of GD-IQ: Spellcheck for Bias, a machine learning tool described as "an intervention tool to infuse diversity and inclusion in entertainment and media". Developed by the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, the Spellcheck for Bias is designed to analyse a script and determine the percentages of characters' "gender, race, LGBTQIA [and] disabilities". It can also track the percentage of "non-gender-defined speaking characters". Davis said that Disney had partnered with her institute to pilot the project: "We're going to collaborate with Disney over the next year using this tool to help their decision-making [and] identify opportunities to increase diversity and inclusion in the manuscripts that they receive. We're very excited about the possibilities with this new technology and we encourage everybody to get in touch with us and give it a try."