In the movies, we've seen AI depicted as both good and evil (but mostly not good), in supercomputers (HAL 9000, Colossus and Skynet to name a few) and in robots (the Machines, Sonny and ED-209). Thanks in part to the availability of large amounts of information/big data, today's AI is at work in a variety of applications that are less science fiction and more oriented to solving business problems and charting new territory. In Rolling Stone, tech entrepreneur Jason Calcanis calls AI the new buzzword: "You just use the phrase'Artificial Intelligence' in your business plan and everyone pays attention." In fact, the AI sector attracted 310 million in funding in 2015, up from 45 million in 2010, according to research from CB Insights.

Artificial intelligence has won Jeopardy, mastered Go and has now predicted the winner of a popular Chinese reality TV show. Developed by Alibaba Cloud, 'Ai' was able to predict not the just the winner of'I'm a singer', Chinese-American singer Coco Lee, but all six finalists. 'We are very pleased with the Ai's performance in achieving 100 percent accuracy in predicting the I'm a Singer competition's results,' Dr. Min Wanli, Alibaba Cloud's chief scientist for artificial intelligence, said in a statement following the show, according to the Wall Street Journal. Developed by Alibaba Cloud, 'Ai' was able to predict not the just the winner of'I'm a singer', Chinese-American singer Coco Lee, but all six finalists. 'The results demonstrated that Ai is making significant progress to understand human emotions and how people make decisions,' he added.

Artificial intelligence has come a long way, but it's still a work in progress. We can find instances of AI from video games to robots, the goal being to mimic the human mind. One Canadian company, Maluuba, is working on a algorithm that will read texts to see if the program can understand what was read. Their goal is "building systems that replicate how human beings learn to read, understand, and reason using state-of-the-art deep learning techniques." Hey, maybe we can finally know what is in the Terms and Conditions we always pass over.

"The robots are coming" is not something Paul Revere said during the American Revolution, but it is certainly something many people have uttered over the years. So have we finally reached the tipping point where artificial intelligence and robots will begin to take over human jobs en masse? Perhaps not, but we are closer to the time when they will be even more essential assets and presences in the workforce, explains Martin Ford, the author of the book "Rise of the Robots." I caught up with Ford at The Economist magazine's Innovation Forum event, which was held earlier this month. He pointed out that artificial intelligence is making its way into sectors that were once manned by only man, including the legal profession, where computer systems such as Watson could muscle in on human territory to provide legal counsel, and even journalism where stories are being written without direct human input about some articles.

Amazon has acquired PhotoTime creator Orbeus, an artificial intelligence startup that specializes in photo-recognition technology. The acquisition took place in the fall of 2015, according to sources familiar with the matter. This would be the latest in a string of acquisitions in the area of deep learning, with deals already completed for high-performance computing company Nice and video processing company Elemental Technologies. Orbeus developed photo-recognition technology based on a powerful type of AI called neural networks. It automatically identifies people and objects in photos and videos.

Here's the thing about the Internet: there's a lot of it and not everything is gold. The job of a news aggregator is to sort through each day's daily dose of Internet and choose the most interesting and relevant stories and videos for you people. Different sites have taken different approaches to this problem; Google News uses its algorithms to deliver a personalized homepage, Reddit uses upvotes and downvotes to deliver the freshest stream of dog photos and entertaining AskReddit topics. Here at Digg, we use humans because our goal is not to recommend lots of good things, but to surface a small amount of the very best things. And while algorithms are good at lots of things, we think that humans have the advantage at recognizing this type of content. However, algorithms are useful when we need to make lots of decisions about what to show you, and this problem arises on our video pages.

Netflix has mysteriously been removed from the American film industry's search engine for legal streaming sites. WhereToWatch, which was set up by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in 2014, lets users search a range of legal streaming services for their favourite TV shows and films. The idea was to provide internet users with a handy resource which would steer them away from illegal streams and downloads, protecting them from potential legal trouble and helping the studios at the same time. However, as TorrentFreak reports, Netflix has been removed from the WhereToWatch search results, despite being the one of the most-used legal streaming services in the world. Netflix results have also been removed from the UK equivalent of the site, FindAnyFilm, although some Netflix results are still available on GoWatchIt, the search engine which powers WhereToWatch.

Forget artificial intelligence for board games. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. used artificial intelligence to predict the winner of a popular Chinese reality TV singing competition – and got the winner and finalists all correct. On Friday night, the cloud-computing arm of Alibaba, Aliyun -- or Alibaba Cloud -- used "Ai," its artificial intelligence program, during the four-hour finale of Hunan TV's "I Am a Singer." The program worked to choose winners as the audience of 500 people who served as judges independently deliberated. The Ai predictions were featured live during the finale.

Tokyo, April 8, 2016 - Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501) today announced the development of "EMIEW3," a humanoid robot, and its "remote brain"*1 robotics IT platform. EMIEW3, capable of autonomously approaching customers requiring assistance, was developed to provide necessary services and guidance in stores and public facilities. Enhanced by the "remote brain" consisting of a robotics IT platform connected to cloud-based intelligent processing systems and a remote operation system to monitor and control multiple robots at various locations, EMIEW3 is able to provide high quality services. Since the announcement of "EMIEW" in 2005, Hitachi has continued to develop human symbiotic robots that can safely co-exist with humans, providing robot-based services with advanced communication capabilities. Using EMIEW2, first announced in 2007, Hitachi developed functions necessary for customer and guidance services, and demonstrated capabilities which include autonomous mobility at a brisk human walking pace, isolation of human voice from background noise, accessing information from the Web to identify objects and using indoor network cameras as "eyes" to locate objects.

He may not be as smart as Watson or Lieutenant Commander Data. He's definitely not as strong as the new FANUC M-2000iA/1700L that can lift 1.7 tons -- the equivalent of two small cars or 24 people. And he is certainly not as pretty as the robot "clones" on Orphan Black. Little did I know though that my favorite robot would be the precursor of the current AI robotic automation wave. The 60s TV series Lost in Space featured a cast member that aided and protected teenager Will Robinson and his family on their comical misadventures in space.