Our team at Shopify has been working on "conversational commerce" for about year now. On Oct 5th, we launched the ability for hundreds of thousands of Shopify merchants to get their products into chat threads and sell directly to their customers through Facebook Messenger. While we were thrilled to get some awesome press coverage, a part of the story that many got wrong was that Shopify had built a bot. In the experience you see above, there's no natural language processing, AI, or even character in the responses. We did something subtly different, but powerful: we simply enabled a merchant's product catalogue to exist richly inside of Messenger, and then we got out of the way. As much as we love the innovation happening in the conversational commerce space, our opinion today is that bots are not the right medium to drive it forward.

While artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are starting to play a more valuable role in people's lives, a new report states that the UK is ill-prepared for an inevitable autonomous future. The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee said today that the UK government "does not yet have a strategy" for fostering AI and robotics or properly considered the "social and ethical dilemmas" they may pose. Ministers found that while such systems are still in their infancy, AI is already starting to have "transformational impacts" on society, suggesting now is the time to evaluate possible the potential ramifications of its growth. The report touches on the development of driverless cars and emergence of supercomputers that can beat world champions at an ancient Chinese board game and questions whether the government has a plan for when "algorithms" go wrong (we all know how Ex Machina played out). "Artificial intelligence has some way to go before we see systems and robots as portrayed in the creative arts such as Star Wars," says Dr Tania Mathias, interim Chair of the Committee.

Last month, giants in the field of deep learning, Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft, announced the launch of a non-profit organization to focus on the ethics and best practices of Artificial Intelligence. The companies involved with the Partnership on AI are known for the huge strides made in the development of Artificial Intelligence in competition with one another. The partnership has stated its objectives "to address opportunities and challenges with AI technologies to benefit people and society." Which comes amidst growing concerns about the future risks of artificial intelligence. Concerns and predictions ranging from job loss to Skynet-like scenarios have saturated the internet.

During his eight years in office, President Barack Obama has seen hackers grow into a threat no president has faced before. US intelligence and law enforcement agencies have responded to everything from a Chinese hack of Google in 2009 to Russian digital meddling in this election. He's learned, as a result, to think a few moves ahead. And that includes preparing for possibilities that others might consider science fiction--like the possibility of an artificial intelligence trained through machine learning and tasked with stealing US nuclear codes. In an era when hackers can steal the fingerprints of 5.6 million federal employees and or pull off a modern version of Watergate, he wonders whether sophisticated adversaries might use AI to infiltrate the government's most sensitive systems.

Historically, when new technologies become easier to use, they transform industries. That's what's happening with artificial intelligence and big data; as the barriers to implementation disappear (cost, computing power, etc.), more and more industries will put the technologies into use, and more and more startups will appear with new ideas of how to disrupt the status quo with these technologies. By my predictions, the AI revolution isn't coming, it's already here, and we'll see it first in a few key sectors. Most people agree that healthcare is broken, and many startups believe that the biggest answer is putting the power back in the hands of the patient. We're all carrying the equivalent of Star Trek's tricorder around in our pockets (or an early version, at any rate) and smartphones and other smart devices will continue to advance and integrate with AI and big data to allow individuals to self-diagnose.

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, in his role as President of the Royal Marsden NHS (National Health Service) Foundation Trust, watches as lead surgeon Pardeep Kumar, performs surgery for the removal of a bladder tumour on a male patient during a visit to the Royal Marsden Hospital on November 07, 2013 in Sutton, Greater London. Founded in 2014 and backed by the likes of Salesforce billionaire Marc Benioff with 20 million ( 16 million), the Tel Aviv-based company says it has taught an algorithm to identify early signs of breast cancer with the help of thousands of previous mammograms. That constantly improving algorithm - trained using a technique known as machine learning, which is a type of AI that equips computers with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed - is now better than radiologists using the best Computer Aided Detection (CAD) methods for mammography, the company claims. Eldad Elnekave, Zebra's chief medical officer, told Business Insider in Tel Aviv that the algorithm can detect half of the breast cancer cases that are currently being missed by radiologists. Radiologists working for the NHS fail to spot breast cancer in thousands of mammograms every year, according to The Telegraph.

Ask Siri or Amazon Alexa to tell you a joke, and you'll probably get something a 10-year-old would scrunch her nose at. Google wants to change that. The company unveiled Google Home, its Amazon Echo-like home assistant, last week. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google hired writers from places like Pixar and the Onion to help spice up the Home's dialogue and give its AI more personality. Apparently there's more work to be done: As Tech Crunch points out, Google currently has a job listing for someone with "experience writing dialogue for plays/screenplays, fiction/interactive fiction, and/or comedy/entertainment." Personality can be hard to nail down in AI.

Advances in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) are going to completely change how we live and work but the UK government is totally unprepared, MPs have warned. The Science and Technology Committee released a report on Wednesday warning that the UK government "does not yet have a strategy" for equipping citizens with the skills they need to flourish in a world where AI is more prevalent. It also has no strategy for dealing with the social and ethical dilemmas that AI advances present, according to the report. Acting chair of the Science and Technology Committee, Dr Tania Mathias MP, said in a statement: "Artificial intelligence has some way to go before we see systems and robots as portrayed in the creative arts such as Star Wars. At present, 'AI machines' have narrow and specific roles, such as in voice-recognition or playing the board game'Go'. "But science fiction is slowly becoming science fact, and robotics and AI look destined to play an increasing role in our lives over the coming decades.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

"The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed." In an automated world, is it nearly time to put humans out to pasture? Does the future resemble a leisure-time utopia or a robot-tended human-zoo? Will the notion of work become a thing of the past if machines really can do everything better, faster and for longer? From driving taxis, to writing reports, to designing websites, there is or may soon be an artificially intelligent system better equipped to do your job at a fraction of the cost.