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Self-driving cars without steering wheels or pedals might have gotten a little bit closer to reality late last week. On Friday, the California Department of Motor Vehicles released a revised draft of regulations that could give more flexibility to autonomous car manufacturers than they have today. The proposed regulations allow testing driverless cars that pass a federal safety inspection, even with no driver in the car. At the moment, states with self-driving car regulation normally require the presence of drivers. In California, 15 companies have permits to test vehicles as long as there is a licensed driver along for the ride, according to Reuters.

Never mind cancer research or climate change: IBM is finally bringing its Watson AI technology to bear on one of the real challenges still facing human civilisation – regulatory compliance. Big Blue has announced plans to snarf up Promontory Financial Group, a risk management and regulatory compliance consultancy, and combine the firm's expertise with Watson's cognitive capabilities in order to address the growing burden of regulation and risk management requirements. Promontory has about 600 workers in 19 offices across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and the Middle East, and these are set to form the stout-hearted core of a new Watson Financial Services portfolio within IBM's Industry Platforms business. If all goes well, the transaction is expected to close before the end of 2016, but financial details of the deal have not been disclosed. According to IBM, more than 20,000 new regulatory requirements were created last year alone, and the complete catalogue of regulations is projected to exceed 300 million pages by 2020.

Dr R.V. Parameshwaran, head of the department of Nuclear Medicine at Manipal Hospitals, is a close friend of mine--more to my own good fortune and not so much the good doctor's! Apart from being a brilliant physician, Param is possessed of an insatiable curiosity with all things technical, and passionately believes that technology can be harnessed by the medical profession in order to better serve the sick. He and I have collaborated on assessing investments in start-ups that are focused on the healthcare space in India. He recently passed on an article to me which was focused on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine--from the website Futurism; founded last year, it is focused on emerging technologies, and attempts to take complex content and break it down into components that are easily understood. It has an unusually large following on Facebook--over 2 million followers.

Software giant Google is beginning an aggressive foray into hardware production with the launch Tuesday of a smartphone and other devices that will bring the company into direct competition with other leading tech firms, including its longtime partner Samsung. The launch signals a major shift for one of the world's most profitable companies as it seeks to adapt to a technology landscape increasingly dominated by mobile and other connected hardware. Google must find a way, analysts say, to keep acquiring user data for targeting ads as Web search -- traditionally done from laptop or desktop computers -- is supplanted by newer technologies. Google's new smartphone, the Pixel, will employ artificial-intelligence technology that users can converse with, allowing them to sidestep keyboards as they access online information and make purchases such as movie tickets, say people familiar with the company's plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal information ahead of its official release. The company also plans to release other new hardware, including a voice-based assistant for the home to rival Amazon's Echo and a virtual-reality headset to rival Facebook's Oculus.

In Episode 7 of "The Twilight Zone," a convicted prisoner falls in love with a humanoid robot while serving his sentence on an abandoned asteroid. In Spike Jonze's drama "Her," the introverted Theodore Twombly becomes emotionally attached to an artificial intelligence named Samantha. In another story, set in the present day, an automotive company designs a robotic baby and markets it toward childless mothers. On Monday, Toyota Motor Corp debuted Kirobo Mini, a robotic companion small enough to fit in a cupholder. With big eyes and a high-pitched voice, Kirobo is designed to trigger a maternal response from its owner.

Driving can sometimes be a solitary affair, heading from place to place with only the road and the radio for company, but that could change with Kirobo Mini. It's a small robot developed by Toyota that's designed to act as a virtual companion, listening to and responding to chat from people in a car or just about anywhere. At 10 centimeters tall, its small size means it can easily be carried around. The technology behind it is quite simple. Audio is sent from Kirobo's microphone to a smartphone running a companion app. The phone passes the audio on to a Toyota cloud service that runs voice recognition and helps to determine the appropriate response.

Machine learning's expansive capacity to quickly turn big health data into evidence-based care will challenge all practitioners of medicine to either grow along with the technology or accept getting left behind by it. And radiologists will be among the first to feel its push (if they're not among the rads who are already working with it). So predict a pair of medical thought leaders in commentary published online Sept. 29 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Emergency physician Ziad Obermeyer, MD, MPhil, of Harvard and oncologist/bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania note that the AI subfield of machine learning draws out rules from data. This is distinct from AI "expert systems" algorithms, which apply human-created rules to draw conclusions about specific scenarios.

As machine learning in finance has been harshly questioned of late, Deutsche Bank, noting the repeated discussions in the media, issues their own take in a 110-page report out September 30. The is that while machine learning can be "very relevant" in finance, "dangerous pitfalls" exist. After defining machine learning – "machine learning is an empirical, algorithmic approach to the problems already tackled by Statistics" – the report explained the nuance. The more the topic is explained the more the strengths and weaknesses in adaptive trading and investment methods are clear. Understanding how an algorithmic approach in investing can, to various degrees, be dependent on category organization.

Neither artificial intelligence nor fintech – or even the union of the two – is really anything new, despite the recent buzz regarding all of the above. With that being said, we are indeed approaching that point where the underlying technology begins to make a noticeable difference in people's lives. From there, it won't be long before we begin to wonder how we ever lived without artificially intelligent financial advisors implementing our own personal monetary policy. Well, did you know that digital camera technology has been around since the 1970s but simply wasn't good enough to get mainstream traction until decades later? Don't worry, Kodak didn't see it coming, either.