Robot, it is a term mentioned as far back as the 1920's. The fictional tension of having a machine capable of human thinking, inspired many writers during the past century to come up with incredible science fictional stories. As time passed however, technology evolved beyond our wildest dreams and little by little, sci-fi became reality. The question is however, what has already been accomplished with our current technology and what remains science fiction? It is described as a humanoid robot, capable of executing and comprehending human speech, while interacting with the user in different ways.

Thinking machines are still decades away from stealing our jobs, but in the meantime they could drastically improve our quality of life and even earn us some extra cash, according to a leading artificial intelligence expert. Toby Simpson, chief technology officer at Cambridge global learning and simulation firm Ososim, will discuss how AI will impact our future at the London Press Club's monthly gathering on Monday. Mr Simpson previously worked at AI company DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014 and is now based in King's Cross. He specialises in biologically inspired artificial intelligence, which helps to make it more human-like and emotional in its interactions with people. At the event for industry professionals in Whitehall -- called Technology: How far can it go?

Financial institutions are under immense pressure to utilise data more efficiently. More than ever before, we have access to'live' data on transactions, payments, consumer behaviour, trade etc, knowing how to best utilise this data can be a gamechanger for business. Artificial Intelligence can make business technology solutions smarter, but being a'new' to the mainstream it also comes with uncertainty. Rise aims to spark debate around the current integration of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning into large institutions and the respective roles banks, startups and the regulator play in driving these innovations forward.

Event[0] ReviewPrice: 14.99 Developer: Ocelot Society Publisher: Ocelot Society Platform: PC Hidden inside one of Event[0]'s chunky CRT terminals is an event log in which two crewmembers of the Nautilus space yacht discuss living with an Artificial Intelligence. One of the crew mentions being lonely on account of having nobody but a stupid AI to talk to. The other remarks that an AI doesn't have to be intelligent to be good company, it only needs to appear human. It's an astute self-observation by developers Ocelot Society, and gets to the nub of why Event[0] succeeds where so many other games fail. In gaming, AI isn't so much about actual intelligence as it is creating a convincing illusion of intelligence, which is often achieved through means other than algorithms and machine learning.

My deep concerns over the impact that Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, and over-automation will eventually have on society have led me to write several thought-provoking articles to help raise awareness while course correction is still possible. Whichever way the future unfolds, we do have some time in hand. The kind of mass scale automation that may eventually come about is still 50-100 years away, most likely. Still, there is a very high probability that massive degrees of automation WILL eventually come about. Huge displacement of workers WILL take place due to such automation.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence IoT Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. Baidu, the Chinese-based internet services conglomerate, has made several major announcements about its upcoming IoT projects. The company's plans center on a revamped artificial intelligence (AI) platform, which the company hopes will enable it to effectively increase its presence in the world of the IoT. Baidu plans to use this revamped AI platform to develop a voice assistant similar to Amazon's Echo, reports Bloomberg. It will be working with speaker manufacturer Harman Industries to develop the device, which it hopes will allow users to order food, summon a ride, or control smart home products via voice commands.

Having previously seen the phrase'Let's meet at the airport', SwiftKey can now infer that'office' or'hotel' are similar words that could also be appropriate predictions in place of'airport'. Microsoft has released an overhauled version of its popular Android and iOS keyboard, SwiftKey, which packs a neural network into a smartphone. Artificial intelligence, it seems, is suddenly everywhere, helping personal assistants from Google, Apple and Microsoft understand your speech and talk naturally, as well as organize your life's photos and translate your words into foreign languages. With Microsoft's updated SwiftKey keyboard, the company says it becomes "the first instance of neural networks being used locally on a smartphone". However, Google has also used a mini neural network its Google Translate app, which enabled text to be translated on the screen via the camera lens even without an internet connection.

Claude Shannon liked to play games when he wasn't particularly busy building mathematical models. In one of his party games (the Shannon Switching Game), he drew a graph that had two special nodes A and B. Each edge of the graph is either coloured or deleted--the initial state of each edge is decided randomly. Two players, one named Cut and the other Short, make a move alternately. Short's job is to colour an edge in each of his turns; he wins if he can establish a coloured path from A to B. Cut's job is to prevent Short from doing so; if Cut manages to partition A and B, she wins. The Shannon Switching Game is quite enthralling.

Pete Skomoroch and Jon Bruner will be hosting O'Reilly Bot Day October 19, 2016, in San Francisco. Bots have become hot, fast. Their rise--fueled by advances in artificial intelligence, consumer comfort with chat interfaces, and a stagnating mobile app ecosystem--has been a bright spot in an otherwise darkening venture-capital environment. I've been speaking with a lot of bot creators--most recently at a conference called Botness that took place in San Francisco at the beginning of June--and have noticed that a handful of questions appear frequently. On closer inspection, bots seem a little less radical and a lot more feasible.