Residents of Helsinki, Finland will soon be used to the sight of buses with no drivers roaming the city streets. One of the world's first autonomous bus pilot programs has begun in the Hernesaari district, and will run through mid-September. Finnish law does not require vehicles on the road to have a driver, making it the perfect place to get permission to test the Easymile EZ-10 electric mini-buses. "This is actually a really big deal right now," Harri Santamala, project manager at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences and the test project lead, told a local news outlet. SEE: When will we get driverless cars?

There is universal proverb that roughly translates into "Empty vessels make the most noise." Some ascribe it to Plato, but having come from Punjab (India), I can safely confirm that the Punjabi translation means exactly that, and Punjab has as much to do with Plato as chicken tikka masala has to do with French cuisine. One of my favourite version of this proverb comes from Polish, which translated into English means, "The cow which moos a lot gives little milk." This pretty much reflects a certain philosopher from Oxford who without having any foundation in principles of engineering, let alone (proper) machine learning, seems to think himself as the leading authority to warn the world against the perils of machine learning. And for the last few years has busied himself making outrageous, pseudoscientific and shamanic claims to sell his book.

The robots have won, thanks to the geniuses at this year's Clarifai x General Assembly Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Hackathon! Last week, 150 developers gathered at General Assembly's swanky Flatiron office to build, hack, and make creative, robot apocalypse-inducing, A.I.-based smart apps. The theme of our A.I. hackathon was to build something to advance the robot apocalypse - in a tongue-in-cheek way, obviously. The winning hacks were incredibly creative and seriously devious, but everyone who participated went above and beyond any other event we've ever hosted. Eleven hours of coding with hackers from different backgrounds, schools, and industries really made this hackathon a success!

Cancer, the single most feared diagnosis imaginable, is being tackled by some of the biggest companies in the world using the most formidable weapon: à la artificial intelligence. In fact, the milestones we have hit in past two years in diagnosing rare forms of cancer using clinical data, has stumped the scientific community. At the University of Tokyo's Institute of Medical Science, IBM's Watson matched a patients' symptoms against 20 million clinical oncology studied. In the western world, Google and Amazon are helping scientists analyze genetic data. Both, Google Genomics and Amazon Web Services, are offering analytical functions of the cloud to help scientists make sense of genomics data.…

In a Public Policy Polling survey, quite a few Texans say they'll vote for Harambe for president in November. If you haven't looked at the Internet in a while, Harambe was a gorilla fatally shot by a zookeeper after a toddler fell into his pen, but he's more than that. He's a meme, and his candidacy in Texas represents the voice of the Internet insinuating its way into polling. Traditional polling methods aren't working the way they used to. Upstart analytics firms like Civis and conventional pollsters like PPP, Ipsos, and Pew Research Institute have all been hunting for new, more data-centric ways to uncover the will of the whole public, rather than just the tiny slice willing to answer a random call on their landline.

So how do we program a computer to translate human language? The simplest approach is to replace every word in a sentence with the translated word in the target language. This is easy to implement because all you need is a dictionary to look up each word's translation. But the results are bad because it ignores grammar and context. So the next thing you might do is start adding language-specific rules to improve the results.

In the 2013 film Her, Spike Jonze offered his take on a society in which our closest relationships are not with humans but with technology. The movie tells the story of a lonely man who purchases a voice-controlled A.I. that evolves to meet his needs. Samantha, as she's known, eventually becomes so in sync with him that they fall in love. Oddly enough, the technology in Her is not as far off as you might think. At her core, Samantha is an interface capable of interpreting needs through conversation and contextual cues.

Predicting the future is an imprecise art. But after years of crying wolf, one thing is becoming clear: automation is set to change the world of work forever. "It's not easy to measure automation precisely, but anecdotal and economic evidence indicate we have every reason to believe it will move faster and faster," says Martin Ford, global thought leader on automation at work and author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the threat of a jobless future. Ford, who will be speaking at the upcoming Creative Innovation Conference, first became interested in an automated future while running a small software company in the 1990s. Back then, software still came on CD ROMs that were shipped to customers – a job that, while tech based, still required a human touch.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, dressed as Super Mario, holds a red ball during the closing ceremony of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Japanese PM Shinzo Abe's show-stopping appearance at today's closing ceremony in Rio, dressed as iconic game character Super Mario, already sets the tone for what lies in store. Japan is known internationally for its technological innovations, so Tokyo 2020 organizers are aiming to launch ambitious tech projects that will boost the economy and wow crowds. Tourists staying next to the Olympic Village in Tokyo's Odaiba neighborhood can choose, for example, to hang out with robot helpers of all sizes and sorts that offer up tips on the best transport, food and entertainment options in Tokyo. And that won't be the only place they'll encounter their robotic counterparts.

Aptonomy Inc. has developed drone technology that could make prison breaks, robberies or malicious intrusions of any kind impossible for mere mortals. Dubbing it a kind of "flying security guard," the company has built its systems on top of a drone often used by movie-makers, the DJI S-1000, a camera-carrying octocopter. To that skeleton, Aptonomy adds a new flight controller, and second computer to power day- and night-vision cameras, bright lights, and loudspeakers, among other things. And more importantly than the hardware features, Aptonomy has developed artificial intelligence and navigational systems that allow its drones to fly low and fast, avoiding obstacles in structure-dense environments, and detecting human activity or faces in the area, autonomously. A user can open up a browser, get onto the Aptonomy interface, click on a point on a map to send out a drone to a particular location, then watch that flight in real time, or review a recording of it later.