Auto accidents kill more than 33,000 Americans each year, more than homicide or prescription drug overdoses. Companies working on self-driving cars, such as Alphabet and Ford, say their technology can slash that number by removing human liabilities such as texting, drunkenness, and fatigue. But Christopher Hart, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, says his agency's experience investigating accidents involving autopilot systems used in trains and planes suggests that humans can't be fully removed from control. He told MIT Technology Review that future autos will be much safer, but that they will still need humans as copilots. What follows is a condensed transcript.

The Chinese Internet giant Baidu Inc. has been making big progress in applying deep learning neural networks to improve image recognition, language translation, search ranking and click prediction in advertising. Now, it's going to give a lot of it away. The company, often called "China's Google," will announce Thursday at the annual Baidu World conference in Beijing that it's offering the artificial intelligence software that its own engineers have been using for years as open source. Available in an early version on GitHub with full availability Sept. 30, it's code-named PaddlePaddle, for PArallel Distributed Deep LEarning. Deep learning is the branch of machine learning that attempts to emulate the way neurons work in the human brain to find patterns in data representing sounds, images, and other data.

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Recently I heard the strains of Bach's Sonata No 3 in G Minor (BWV 1029) Allegro, and as I pondered on the richness, harmony and texture of the sounds. I recalled I had heard this before listening to a live broadcast of the same piece of music on the BBC. It was Alissa Firsova's fantastic arrangement of the final movement of Bach's Viola da Gamba sonata in G minor performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Andrew Litton on 14th August 2010 at the Royal Albert Hall. I pulled out my phone and loaded Shazam I wanted to find out who had performed this particular piece. Shazam did its thing and in seconds I had the details of Glenn Gould Remastered Columbia Album, of course it had to be.

In his fifteenth post in the series, Marshall Kirkpatrick focuses on the intersection between artificial intelligence and social media. By way of reminder, Marshall launched a 30 day series that explores the intersection between AI and the various innovation components on my emerging futures visual. As he has in each post, Marshall identifies the key subject matter experts that sit at the intersection of AI and the visual component in question. In the case of social media, the key influencers are: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Tamara McCleary, and Amber Armstrong. Here is the foresight and related future scenarios identified at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and social media (taken straight from Marshall's post): Much of AI today is focused on recommendations.

AI is also emerging as a force for startups and emerging companies, too, as several entrepreneurial ventures in North Carolina are demonstrating in "fintech." Financial technology, better known as fintech, startups account for 10 percent of the some 90 companies chosen to present at the upcoming Council for Entrepreneurial Development's annual venture conference. A new report cites the plunging costs and advances of artificial intelligence as key drivers. AI's impact alone in one sector of fintech shows its potential. According to Juniper Research, fintech platforms are being used for review and approval/disapproval of unsecured consumer loans at a remarkable rate.

We identified over 90 companies that are applying machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics to reduce drug discovery times, provide virtual assistance to patients, and diagnose ailments by processing medical images, among other things.

Readers of my previous article, which sought to debunk some of the myths around robotic process automation and artificial intelligence, were hopefully convinced to not be fearful of an impending jobs apocalypse. However I hope they were not led to believe that a move to RPA is all smooth sailing and happy faces, because the truth is there are numerous processes and rules to consider before your business takes the plunge. Not least of these are the potentially significant legal implications that could arise from inviting robots to take charge of the inner workings of a business. Even though it is a fledgling area for many organisations, we have already encountered numerous legal conundrums as clients work through the changes in the way they engage within their existing ecosystem. Some of these legal implications are specific to an industry vertical or local regulatory settings, but I hope it is helpful to lay some of them out so others can ponder what it could mean for them. I'm hoping this article will open eyes a little wider within organisations looking to proactively prepare and make provisions for their journey into RPA and AI.

You know that company called Facebook? Yeah, the one that has 1.6 billion people hooked on their website. Take all of the happy birthday posts, embarrassing pictures of you as a little kid, that one family relative that likes every single one of your statuses, and you have a whole lot of data to analyze. In terms of analyzing the images, Facebook has undoubtedly made great progress with deep CNNs. A little over a week ago, the team at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) published a blog post detailing the computer vision techniques that are behind some of their object segmentation algorithms.

IBM's Watson AI (artificial intelligence) has added yet another skill to its collection. This time it has created the first-ever sci-fi AI-made movie trailer for "Morgan," that was released in theatres on September 2 by 20th Century Fox. Morgan, staring Kate Mara and Paul Giamatti, is a sci-fi thriller about scientists who have developed a synthetic humanoid whose potential has grown dangerously beyond their control. To prepare the machine for the task at hand, the IBM Research system analysed hundreds of horror/thriller movie trailers. In order to get an idea of the dynamics of a trailer, the computer then performed a series of visual, sound and composition studies.