A baby robot designed to "invoke an emotional connection" has been unveiled in Japan, where plummeting birth rates have left many couples without children. The Kirobo Mini was created by Toyota's non-automotive department and is equiped with artificial intelligence and a camera so it can recognise the face of the person speaking to it and respond. "He wobbles a bit, and this is meant to emulate a seated baby which hasn't fully developed the skills to balance itself," said Fuminori Kataoka, Kirobo Mini's chief design engineer. "This vulnerability is meant to invoke an emotional connection." Toyota plans to sell Kirobo Mini, which blinks its eyes and speaks with a baby-like high-pitched voice, for 39,800 yen ( 300/US 390) in Japan next year.

Israeli pharmaceutical firm Teva is partnering with US chipmaker Intel to develop wearables and a machine-learning platform that can be used in the treatment of Huntington's Disease. Huntington's is a genetic and typically fatal neurodegenerative disease that causes nerve cells in the brain to deteriorate. This leads to a host of behavioral and psychological problems, including involuntary writhing movements called chorea. There is no cure for Huntington's, but Teva and Intel hope to spur the development of next-generation treatment options by better understanding the progression of the disease and how current treatments impact a patients' quality of life. The companies plan to accomplish this by combining Intel's capabilities in analytics and algorithms with Teva's work around Huntington's treatment and research.

Customer interactions with brands will soon become managed by AI via messaging platforms -- and companies need to be ready. We live in the age of mobile applications. There are currently several million apps available. This profusion of choices means it can be difficult for users not only to choose which apps to download, but to manage them all -- a phenomenon we call "app fatigue." This situation creates both a need and an opportunity to engage users on a single platform.

Amazon, DeepMind/Google, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft announced yesterday that they will create a non-profit organization that will work to advance public understanding of artificial intelligence technologies and formulate best practices on the challenges and opportunities within the field. Academics, non-profits and specialists in policy and ethics will be invited to join the Board of the organization, named the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society (Partnership on AI). The objective of the Partnership on AI is to address opportunities and challenges with AI technologies to benefit people and society. Together, the organization's members will conduct research, recommend best practices and publish research under an open license in areas such as ethics, fairness and inclusivity; transparency, privacy and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability and robustness of the technology. It does not intend to lobby government or other policymaking bodies.

Robots can do many things humans can do, often better. They mix cocktails, stand in for security guards and dispose of bombs. One thing we're sure they can never do better: care for our kids. They can't snuggle, kiss boo-boos or exhibit unconditional love, not like a mom or dad or child care worker can. But that didn't stop the makers of iPal from creating a creepy nanny robot that they're billing as a babysitter. It's a 3-foot-tall talking bot, complete with a surveillance cam, a touch screen tablet and tons of apps, you know, to keep your kid occupied and happy when you can't.

A startup called Heek wants to make building websites as simple as chatting over text and answering a few questions. Using a conversational interface, the bot asks you questions about yourself, your business and your site, then lets you click to see different designs you can customize to meet your needs. The bot will even prompt you to save your work, as you get further into the site creation process. Many of today's chatbots have fallen short when it comes being a more efficient way of interacting with a web service, and often lead to frustrating experiences due to their restrictive nature. But in Heek's case, the idea of turning website creation into something that can be handled conversationally could appeal to the small business owner who doesn't have the funds for a professional designer, nor the technical chops to manage website creation – even via the more basic website builders that are on the market today.

While Google and Tesla duke it out for autonomous driving supremacy -- and Apple waits in the wings -- Nvidia might actually offer the best solution. Unlike the traditional approach to autonomous driving, Nividia is teaching its card to drive the same way driving instructors taught each of us. Rather than relying on programming alone, Nvidia's AI is fully capable of learning just by watching human drivers -- for better or worse. Dubbed'BB-8' (Disney is not going to be happy about that naming choice), the program doesn't share the challenges faced by current self-driving technology. Blind corners, hard turns, construction zones and traveling on uncharted roads offers a fair bit of difficulty for Google's autonomous driver.

Artificial intelligence ushers in technology disruption: AI era Artificial intelligence software solutions will likely be the top disruptor in technology in the next decade, like smartphones and the cloud. Software's ability to self-learn by processing data may spur consumer and enterprise applications. Companies embracing AI may get a competitive edge; ones that don't run the risk of being disrupted and phased out. AI is nascent, but the pace of innovation and disruptive potential of startups will accelerate as compute costs shrink and machine-learning algorithms advance.

James Lovelock's parting words last time we met were: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky, it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan." It was early 2008, and the distinguished scientist was predicting imminent and irreversible global warming, which would soon make large parts of the planet uninhabitably hot or put them underwater. The fashionable hope that windfarms or recycling could prevent global famine and mass migration was, he assured me, a fantasy; it was too late for ethical consumption to save us. Before the end of this century, 80% of the world's population would be wiped out.

Some of the world's biggest tech companies are teaming up to address the future of artificial intelligence and how it will affect privacy, safety, interoperability and collaboration between people and AI. Amazon, Google's DeepMind division, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft have founded the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (PAI) to consider how and why AI developments, such as online facial recognition, might be a cause for concern. "Every new technology brings transformation, and transformation sometimes also causes fear in people who don't understand the transformation. One of the purposes of this group is really to explain and communicate the capabilities of AI, specifically the dangers and the basic ethical questions," said Yann LeCun, Facebook's director of AI. LeCun advises that the group will foster communication among those who build AI, bring in additional opinions from academia and civil society and inform the public on the progress of AI.