Right now, your apples are harvested by humans. But Washington may soon face a shortage of apple pickers: as soon as 2021, according to Washington State University economist Karina Gallardo. The labor pool is shrinking with tougher immigration enforcement and a growing Mexican economy. The solution could be automation - as in robots. But don't expect to see them soon.

SEOUL: Tech giant Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said on Thursday it is acquiring U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) platform developer Viv Labs Inc, a firm run by a co-creator of Apple Inc's Siri voice assistant programme. Samsung said in a statement it plans to integrate the San Jose-based company's AI platform, called Viv, into the Galaxy smartphones and expand voice-assistant services to home appliances and wearable technology devices. Technology firms are locked in an increasingly heated race to make AI good enough to let consumers interact with their devices more naturally, especially via voice. Alphabet Inc's Google is widely considered to be the leader in AI, but others including Amazon.com, Apple and Microsoft have also launched their own offerings including voice-powered digital assistants. Samsung, the world's top smartphone maker, is also hoping to differentiate its devices, from phones to fridges, by incorporating AI.

Customers at Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest may soon be sorting out issues with help from a virtual chatbot. Web-based Luvo will be able to answer simple queries such as how to order a replacement card. Designed using IBM Watson technology, the virtual agent is able to understand and learn from human interactions. In future, Luvo may be able to understand if a customer was feeling frustrated or unhappy and change its tone and actions accordingly, IBM said. The service will initially be rolled out to RBS and NatWest customers, starting in December with about 10% of RBS customers in Scotland.

At the Gigaom Change conference in Austin, Texas, on September 21-23, 2016, Manoj Saxena (Chairman of CognitiveScale), Josh Sutton (Head of Data & Artificial Intelligence at Publicis Sapient) and Rob High (CTO for IBM Watson) talked with moderator and market strategist, Patricia Baumhart, about the next frontier in artificial intelligence and how the race to win in AI will soon reshape our world. Artificial intelligence is a field with a long history starting as early as 1956, but today what we're beginning to see emerge is a new convergence of 6 major technologies: AI, cloud, mobile, social, big data and blockchain. Each of the panelists agreed that as we enter into the next digital frontier, AI will be woven into each of these areas causing a "super-convergence" of capabilities. Saxena predicts that "this age of the Internet is going to look small by comparison to what's happening in AI." It's true. The proliferation of AI creates a new world of application and computation design, including embodied cognition in concierge-style robots that help when we need assistance.

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

My team and I attended several legaltech-focused conferences this month and of course, as expected, machine learning and AI were the topics that everyone wanted to discuss in between sessions. Yet interestingly, at the Emerging Legal Technology Forum put on by Legalx, one of the panelists -- Mark Tamminga, leader of innovation initiatives at at Gowling WLG -- was against using these terms in reference to emerging legal technologies. He pointed out that often what is being called AI is really not that at all, and felt that these words were being used as fancy buzzwords that escape the real mechanics of these technologies. As someone deeply involved in the development community here in Toronto, I wholeheartedly agree with his perspective. Many of the conversations occurring in legaltech around what people are calling machine learning are actually algorithmic solutions preprogrammed (that's right, programmed by humans) to do a particular task; nothing that deviates greatly from anything that's already been done many years ago.

Another big application of this pattern is routing support tickets. Although this sounds simple, it's actually rather complicated. For those of you who run consumer apps or services, you must be accustomed to getting tons of customer feedback. If you process this feedback right and in a timely manner, you can deliver an amazing customer experience. But one big issue is that, if your app or service were to experience exponential growth, your support costs also go up exponentially, because as a business you do want to try your best to look at every support issue/ticket.

As we've reported previously, the Internet of Things is changing data science, and a visiting executive from analytics company SAS went into further detail into how IoT along with artificial intelligence is reshaping the industry. Oliver Schabenberger is the executive VP of SAS's research and development division and recently appointed CTO, and was recently in Sydney to discuss updates to the new SAS Viya analytics platform and to share his thoughts on the future of the analytics industry. He said that IoT has led to the increasing importance of edge analytics, with data now being observed on a continuum, requiring differing techniques to be deployed depending on observation point, accuracy and speed of data movement. "We can no longer just think about processing data in the cloud; we also have to think about event stream processing," he added. He also said that analytics software is quickly transitioning into the cognitive space, where sensing, listening and gesturing will become common forms of input, and reading and writing of human-like responses will become common forms of output.

The modern day shopping experience is flush with personalized options, concierge services, same day shipping and of course, endless options. While shopping online allows consumers to order products from virtually anywhere in the world, it can be challenging to sift through the unwanted items and find the desired ones. As stated in a study by Forrester Research, U.S. consumers will spend 327 billion online by the end of 2016. With more opportunities than ever to capitalize on online spending, online retailers are realizing they must make an impression on consumers. How do they do that?

Microsoft Corp. MSFT, 0.70% said Thursday it is expanding its artificial intelligence effort with the creation of a new unit called Microsoft AI and Research. The group will be led by Microsoft veteran Harry Shum and will be joined by more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers, the company said in a statement. The move is expected to accelerate the company's effort to deliver new AI capabilities. Shares were flat in early trade, but are up 4.5% in the year to date, while the S&P 500 SPX, 0.43% has gained 6%.