Dire predictions that humans will be replaced by machines in the workplace continue to make headlines. Drones are delivering packages to your doorstep. The manufacturing, automotive and healthcare industries are already highly automated in many countries, and technology companies are racing to create the next "new and improved" version of artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, a much-cited Oxford study that looked at 702 occupations in the U.S. concluded that 47% of U.S. employment is at risk of being lost to computerization. U.S. employee anxiety notwithstanding, this begs the question: What has your company done in the wake of such news?

Julie Sobowale is a freelance journalist and lawyer based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, specializing in legal reporting. She writes about trends in the legal industry including legal technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, diversity and major shifts in legal culture. Her work has appeared in publications from the American Bar Association, the Canadian Bar Association, the Canadian Corporate Council Association, Canadian Lawyer and the Nova Scotia Barristers Society. She's also given presentations on legal trends, alternative careers and legal education. She graduated from the Dalhousie Schulich School of Law in 2012 and was the recipient of the Dalhousie Faculty of Law Leadership Award.

On Thursday, HPE announced the immediate commercial availability of HPE Haven OnDemand, a cloud platform that provides advanced machine-learning APIs, so that developers can build data-rich mobile and web applications. Colin Mahony heads up the HPE Big Data Platform, which includes products like Vertica, Idol, and Haven OnDemand. He said that some people in the enterprise don't embrace machine learning because they view it as requiring extensive understanding of both statistics and coding. And, with Haven OnDemand, they want to make it easier for people to take advantage of machine learning tools. "What we're trying to do is say here's a portfolio, initially these 60 APIs, where you can call in, in very simple protocols through these RESTful APIS, and you can leverage a lot of the really rich machine learning that we've done," Mahony said.

Eric Thayer/GettyHonda Motors demonstrates its Asimo robot during a media preview of the 2014 New York International Auto Show. Bank of America Merrill Lynch recently came out with its "Transforming World Atlas" research note, which examines global economic trends through a series of maps. One notable map showed which countries had the highest number of operational robots. Japan was number one with 310,508 operational robots, according to data from 2012. There's even a hotel staffed almost entirely by robots that opened last year in Nagasaki, Japan, according to BAML.

"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.

To the editor: I was dismayed by the article on Google DeepMind's computer. It was further evidence of how the media's naivete regarding the term "artificial intelligence," or AI, has totally corrupted its meaning. DeepMind, as well as IBM's legendary Jeopardy super-champion Watson and numerous other cited AI systems all have the intelligence of a rock. The intelligence of these systems lies in the human intelligence of the programmers that created the systems, not in the systems themselves. The generally accepted test for true AI is the Lovelace test, which was created, in partnership, by David Ferrucci, who not incidentally was the head of IBM's Watson development team.

Proponents of automated cargo handling at U.S. ports have a rule: where megaships call, robots soon follow. So far, Southern California appears to be the destination of choice for both. Over the next decade, marine terminals at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are expected to lead the way in adopting robotic cargo-handling capabilities in response to the arrival of more supersize ships. Unloading and organizing tens of thousands of containers--and readying an equal number to ship back out--requires coordination on a scale that is best left to machines, said Ashebir Jacob, a port planner and engineer with Moffatt & Nichol, a maritime infrastructure advisory firm. "As we start to receive bigger and bigger vessels on the West Coast, [automation] becomes really critical," he said.

By now you've likely heard the story of Tay, Microsoft's social AI experiment that went from "friendly millennial girl" to genocidal misogynist in less than a day. While Tay promised to learn from her interactions with people online, Microsoft apparently hasn't learned anything from the countless headlines about how Twitter users like to talk to visible women – everything from gleefully anarchic trolling to threats and abuse – otherwise it would have seen this coming. At first, Tay's story seems like a fun one for anyone who's interested in cautionary sci-fi. What does it mean for the future of artificial intelligence if a bot can embody the worst aspects of digital culture after just 16 hours online? If any AI is given the vastness of human creation to study at lightning speed, will it inevitably turn evil?

Audi's autonomous cars are becoming quite the world travelers: Recall the much-ballyhooed first robotic drive from San Francisco to New York City, about a year ago. Impressive stuff, though honestly, humans can hold their own at pulling into a rest stop. I'm about to take on Robby, the autonomous RS7 sport sedan that's designed to rock a racetrack at speeds that would blister Google's cartoonish bubble car. If a human driver can't keep up, it occurs to me, then our obsolescence draws that much closer. Robby is looking cool and confident in the pits at Parcmotor Castelloli, near Barcelona.

Jaguar said when it unveiled its new F-Type SVR that the coupe could hit 200 mph, but Fast and Furious actress Michelle Rodriguez proved them wrong. In her hands, the F-Type SVR topped out at 201 mph, which was both the fastest the coupe has driven and the highest top speed she has achieved on her own. Previously, she says in the video, her personal top speed record was about 140 mph. Rodriguez and a professional driver riding shotgun took the orange coupe up past the magic 200-mph mark on a closed Nevada highway. While Rodriguez has a lengthy Hollywood resume, she is probably best known to car enthusiasts for her role as Leticia "Letty" Ortiz in the Fast and the Furious franchise, and she'll reprise the role in the Furious 8 installment that's being filmed right now.