Would you like to work for a robot? Although the automation of skilled jobs is a reality, your boss is probably (still) a human. Even though the most optimistic artificial intelligence (AI) enthusiast would struggle to persuade us that the technology to create non-human leaders is upon us just yet, robots could be managing people in the decades to come. So would a robot leader be much worse than your current boss? Most people think of leadership as an occupation or a person who is formally in charge of others, but leadership is really the mechanism that enables a group to perform better.

AI-enabled messaging programs that respond to text-based requests -- are the latest innovation that startups and corporations are using to serve existing customers and bring in new ones. Companies across a wide variety of industries are building these tools on popular messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Slack, Kik, and Hipchat, as well as on their own websites and apps. Some are even available by text, to help users do things like fight parking tickets, respond to customer service inquiries, and order tacos. This is by no means an exhaustive list, so if you see we're missing a chatbot that's currently up and running, please share the link with us in the comments section. We'll add new, significant chatbots to the list over time.

I think the recent article in the New York Times about the boom in'artificial intelligence' in Silicon Valley made many people think hard about the future of cybersecurity – both the near and distant future. Sometimes when I hang around with A.I. enthusiasts here in the valley, I feel like an atheist at a convention of evangelicals. What's going on now in the field of'AI' resembles a soap bubble. And we all know what happens to soap bubbles eventually if they keep getting blown up by the circus clowns (no pun intended!): Now, of course, without bold steps and risky investments a fantastical future will never become a reality.

Anyone that might be concerned about computers taking over look away now, because they are a step closer to sounding just like humans. Researchers in the UK at Google's DeepMind unit have been working on making computer-generated speech sound as "natural" as humans. The technology, called WaveNet, which is focused on the area of speech synthesis, or text-to-speech, was found to sound more natural than any of Google's products. However, this was only achieved after the WaveNet artificial neural network was trained to produce English and Chinese speech which required copious amounts of computing power, so the technology probably won't be hitting the mainstream any time soon. Using a convolutional neural network, which is used for artificial intelligence in deep learning, it is trained on data and then the systems make inferences about new data, in addition to being used to generate new data.

Over the past century, we have made massive strides in the rights revolution. These include rights for women, children, the LGBT community, animals, and so much more. Exploring the future, we must ask ourselves: what next? Will we ever fight for the rights of artificial intelligence? If so, when will this AI rights revolution occur, and what will it look like?

In this special guest feature, Chris Monberg, President and CTO of Boomtrain, discusses some ways to demystify AI to the C-suite in order to get over the feeling that AI is overwhelming and inaccessible and see how it can actually be quite valuable when used in the right context. In his current role as President and CTO, Chris is hyper-focused on building the team that is building the most advanced predictive personalization technology in the market. Previously, Chris was the VP of Interactive at Hornall Anderson, a global design firm. In addition to leading a team of designers, engineers, and strategists, Chris launched a R&D lab focused on redefining the relationships between brands, consumers, and technology. As artificial intelligence (AI) gains popularity, many C-suite executives have looked to make it a priority to integrate the technology to help their business. However, with vendors popping up left and right, hawking their products and touting their solutions, it's become quite difficult for these executives to know how AI can help achieve their goals.

Google DeepMind claims to have significantly improved computer-generated speech with its AI technology, paving the way forward for sophisticated talking machines like those seen in sci-fi films like "Her" and "Ex-Machina." The London-based research lab, acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported 400 million, announced on Thursday that it has developed a talking computer programme called "WaveNet" that halves the quality gap that currently exists between human speech and computer speech. Although WaveNet sounds more like a human voice than existing artificial voice generators -- known as "text-to-speech" (TTS) systems -- it requires too much computing power to make it practical, meaning Google won't be integrating it into its products any time soon, according to The Financial Times. Aäron van den Oord, a research scientist, at DeepMind said: "Mimicking realistic speech has always been a major challenge, with state-of-the-art systems, composed of a complicated and long pipeline of modules, still lagging behind real human speech. Our research shows that not only can neural networks learn how to generate speech, but they can already close the gap with human performance by over 50%.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. I don't know why this video of the Yellow Drum Machine popped up in my YouTube feed again, but hey, it's one of my favorite robots of all time: This video was recorded during a lucky run, usually the robot is not able to maintain balance for this long. The shaking is caused by poor state estimation (we only use onboard sensors). I'd love to see IHMC re-run the DRC Finals tasks at some point, just to illustrate how much improvement has been made in Atlas' autonomy and not-falling-over-ness.

Welcome to DeveloperEconomics' weekly news roundup. In this edition, Google cancels its modular smartphone project, Apple plans to delete abandoned apps from the App Store and Epic releases a new version of Unreal Engine 4. Read on for the full news rundown. Google has expanded its Early Access beta testing, allowing any developer apply for the program. Previously, Early Access was only available to 29 hand-picked developers, who got to test out their apps with early-adopters (although other devs were given different testing options). Google says the Early Access program generated over 1 million beta installs since launching in May and "demand is only growing."

The Institute of Complex Systems based in Paris is looking for an intern specialized in data science and machine learning to work on our Multivac Platform. Diploma required: Bac 5 in a quantitative field (applied mathematics, statistics, computing…) Internship starting date: As soon as possible Duration: 2 – 6 month Salary policy: the internship is paid according to the legal wage rates (approx. Interface between disciplines, but also between research organizations and higher education, the ISC-PIF is a place dedicated to the development of innovative and interdisciplinary research on complex systems. Since 2005, the institute is facilitating access to skills, trainings, work areas and pooled research resources based on high performance computing and big data. The institute is a unit of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), one of the largest french research organisation. Description: You will be working on Multivac Platform developed at ISCPIF.