Many of us take for granted how fast our phones are, the fact we no longer need to sign for shopping and Google's Instant Search. The pace of life is the fastest its ever been and the rise of contactless technology and smart devices have put us in the midst of what's been called the'Great Acceleration.' Journalist and author Robert Colvile has explained our'insatiable' desire' for speed and convenience in his upcoming book'The Great Acceleration: How the World is Getting Faster.' The pace of life is the fastest its ever been and the rise of contactless technology (pictured) and smart devices have put us in the midst of the'Great Acceleration.' Author Robert Colvile has explained our'insatiable' desire' for speed and convenience in his upcoming book'The Great Acceleration: How the World is Getting Faster' Writing for The Telegraph, Mr Colvile said we have moved'towards a cashless, paperless economy – a world in which we no longer have to dig around in our pockets for loose change, but can simply swipe our way through lives with carefree glee.

Speaking at Google Cloud Platform in San Francisco, the chairman of Alphabet and former Google CEO highlighted artificial intelligence as the "next evolution" in computing. This will will spur the creation of new apps and services, he said. "Machine learning and crowdsourcing data will be the basis and fundamentals of every successful, huge IPO win in five years, in the same sense that the transition to [mobile] apps five years ago created the modern corporations of Uber, Snapchat and others." Schmidt highlighted Google AlphaGo - which defeated Go champion Lee Sedol last week - as an example of the power of artificial intelligence. See also: Google DeepMind: What is it, how does it work and should you be scared? He also cited Google's Photos image search software as a practical example of how machine learning can be applied to create new products and services when applied to large crowd-sourced datasets.

At its GCP NEXT 2016 conference, the Google Cloud Platform team announced a new offering designed to mainstream the development of machine learning (ML) apps. Developers can now sign up for a limited preview of Google Cloud Machine Learning, a managed platform that helps build ML models with all kinds of data coming in all sizes. "Cloud Machine Learning will take machine learning mainstream, giving data scientists and developers a way to build a new class of intelligent applications," the company said in a blog post yesterday. "It provides access to the same technologies that power Google Now, Google Photos and voice recognition in Google Search as easy to use REST APIs." Google already has a portfolio of pre-trained ML models, and has added a new one, the Google Cloud Speech API, joining the likes of the Translate API and the Vision API.

A company that helps users to create their own websites now knows what kind of sites their 80 million users are building without pestering them with repeated questions. Wix, a Tel Aviv-based web development company, is using machine learning on Google's cloud platform to learn more about its users so it can help them find the images they need to build interesting and useful websites. That's just the beginning of how machine learning will be used in the cloud, according to industry analysts who say machine learning will be the biggest thing that's ever hit the cloud. David Zuckerman, head of developer experience for Wix, said machine learning in the cloud will be a boon to companies that don't have a major research division. "The cloud has brought this technology to everyone," he said.

Tay was meant to be a friendly chatbot. It has been developed by Microsoft, aiming to sound like a typical teenage girl and interact with Twitter, GroupMe and Kik users through its learning AI system. The bot was revealed on Wednesday by Bill Gate's firm, starting with a pleasant tweet stating that "humans are super cool". However, it appears that Microsoft underestimated the dark side of Twitter users and it turns out that, as the chat went on, the AI learned from the users' hateful attitudes and began spouted racist, sexist, anti-Semitic and other loathing comments. In less than 24 hours, the friendly bot transformed into a real jerk.

Following a concerted effort to make a Twitter AI chatbot called Tay say incredibly racist and misogynist things, its creator, Microsoft, has taken it offline for an undetermined amount of time. In the space of just 24 hours, Tay turned from a genderless machine-learning AI designed to learn from Twitter, into a Donald Trump-supporting, holocaust-denying sexist. The Tay account was developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams to learn from 18-24-year-olds – otherwise known as millenials – and, according to Microsoft, "the more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets". As Microsoft should have known, the masses of the internet tend not to play things by the book and, within the space of a few hours, the account with more than 100,000 followers was soon bombarded with vile comments in the hope that Tay would repeat them. No doubt sending Microsoft's PR team into a state of panic, Tay gradually started repeating many of these comments, including such obviously hateful ones as "Hitler did nothing wrong", which, according to The Guardian, was due to an effort led by members from the infamous 4chan forum.

Jeff J Mitchell / Getty ImagesThe robots are coming. But it's not just low-paying positions that will get replaced. AI also could cause high-earning (like top 5% of American salaries) jobs to disappear. That's the theme of New York Times reporter Nathaniel Popper's new feature, "The Robots Are Coming for Wall Street." The piece is framed around Daniel Nadler, the founder of Kensho, an analytics company that's transforming finance.

Tay, Microsoft Corp's so-called chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to engage with millennials on Twitter, lasted less than a day before it was hobbled by a barrage of racist and sexist comments by Twitter users that it parroted back to them. TayTweets (@TayandYou), which began tweeting on Wednesday, was designed to become "smarter" as more users interacted with it, according to its Twitter biography. But it was shut down by Microsoft early on Thursday after it made a series of inappropriate tweets. A Microsoft representative said on Thursday that the company was "making adjustments" to the chatbot while the account is quiet. "Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways," the representative said in a written statement supplied to Reuters, without elaborating.

Microsoft released an AI chat bot that is currently "verified" on Twitter called @TayandYou that was meant to try to learn the way millennials speak and interact with them. It's meant to "test and improve Microsoft's understanding of conversational language" according to The Verge. Things did get pretty controversial. There are other types of people in addition to'millennials' who use Twitter who naturally found the bot, and some of them were able to "hack" into Tay's learning process. Here are some screen shots of tweets that were deleted once the Internet "taught" Tay some things: Tay's developers seemed to discover what was happening and began furiously deleting the racist tweets.

In an unassuming, two-story Victorian town house in Bristol, people are being filmed, monitored, and tracked 24/7. Invisible sensors constantly keep a watchful eye as they go about their business. But what these folks lose in privacy could be our collective gain in life expectancy--that is, if the long-term data bears out. Pivotal to the 15-million ( 21M) Sensor Platform for Healthcare in a Residential Environment (SPHERE) project, this house has been invisibly fitted with dozens of cameras and sensors while its occupants are asked to don wearable devices. The aim is to research how health is related to everyday lifestyle and living conditions over time.