Amongst all the activity in autonomously driven vehicle joint ventures, new R&D facilities, strategic acquisitions (such as Mobileye being acquired by Intel) and booming startup fundings, two big players in the industry, NVIDIA and Bosch, are partnering to develop an AI self-driving car supercomputer. Bosch CEO Dr Volkmar Denner announced the partnership during his keynote address at Bosch Connected World, in Berlin. "Automated driving makes roads safer, and artificial intelligence is the key to making that happen," said Denner. "We are making the car smart. We are teaching the car how to maneuver through road traffic by itself."

We will see a blend of professional data integrators and data scientists -- who can use this technology to become more efficient -- along with a small army of citizen data scientists and citizen data integrators who will be recruited to fill more formal or semiformal roles,

While artificial intelligence isn't likely to come for your job anytime soon (no matter how many dystopian movies say otherwise), AI and machine learning are already automating and improving many everyday tasks, like mobile search or the organization of your family photos. AI is also helping a new breed of companies disrupt industries from medical research to agriculture. Computers can't yet replace humans, but they can do a great job handling the mundane clutter of our lives. And that's why every major tech company is eager to hop on board.

It happened recently as I was looking at demonstrations of two very interesting new technology-based companies that help automate due diligence processes. They are both classic examples of the type of technological innovation that's happening at lightning speed in the legal industry today. They are addressing an enormous pain point in the industry: the mind-numbing burden of manually reviewing thousands of contracts as part of a due diligence mandate. It's the kind of work that has provided a good living for generations of young law firm associates, but it is not efficient and, being human-based, not always very accurate. These two new companies are using technology to make that review more efficient and accurate, by analyzing, summarizing, and extracting structured data from big masses of unstructured and wildly inconsistent documents. To the extent the technology works, it's because it imposes some kind of order on the non-standard work of human lawyers.

Quantum science is still a relatively unknown area, yet with the help of machine learning, scientists are hoping to be on the threshold of a giant leap forward in the field. Scientists from the University of Bristol are working with researchers from Microsoft's Quantum Architectures and Computation Group, and others from the Eindhoven University of Technology, on quantum-enhanced machine learning technology to be used inside a quantum processor. They're hoping that it will allow them to find out more about quantum systems and get to the bottom of the mysterious realm on the very edge of science. One of the main reasons behind the use of machine learning is that traditional computer systems are simply not equipped to handle the heavy workload. According to the University of Bristol's website, the scientists have used something they refer to as a, "reprogrammable two-qubit silicon quantum photonic processor" – which sounds like something taken directly out of a science-fiction film – and "is characterised and certified with the use of a type of machine learning approach, called Bayesian inference".

Uber named Zoubin Ghahramani as its new chief scientist based in in San Francisco, the company announced. He will oversee Uber's AI Labs, its recently created machine learning and artificial intelligence research unit, and will lead AI/machine learning strategy companywide. Ghahramani joined Uber through its acquisition of Geometric Intelligence. He is a professor of information engineering at the University of Cambridge, where he leads a group of about 30 researchers. He was a founding member of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in London, one of the founding directors of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national institute for data science, and a faculty member of Carnegie Mellon University's Machine Learning Department, among other accomplishments.

We talk about artificial intelligence (AI), robots, and machine learning as if they're coming soon, or are just some tech pipe dream. In fact, a special report from Bank of America, Merrill Lynch predicts the global market for AI and robots will be just under $153 billion by 2020, and some industries will experience up to a 30% productivity increase through the use of those technologies alone. That can either terrify you if you've seen too many sci-fi films, or excite you if you consider the upside and benefits it could yield. The reality probably lies somewhere in the middle. There will be disruption – there will be jobs and perhaps even whole industries that see massive displacement from robots and other "intelligent" machines. And that says nothing of the inherent risk associated with creating something capable of logical thinking without emotion. The robots may not rise up and exterminate humanity any time soon, but the development of true AI is closer than you think.

Forget autopilot, the VW Sedric is a self-driving pod car with absolutely no pedals, a steering wheel, or even a cockpit for that matter. It's designed for the fifth level of autonomous driving, which requires no human input at all. At the push of a button, the vehicle transports its passengers to their desired location using the most efficient route(s). "Sedric is a purely electric car, with a battery pack located flat between its axles and the compact electric motor at the wheels. The AI system is located in the compact overhangs at both the front and rear of the pod, and the rider can communicate with the vehicle via a push-button remote to indicate the time at which Sedric should arrive. The button changes color and vibrates when the vehicle gets there, and once the pod recognizes its rider, the wide door opens to allow them to hop in. The user then speaks with a voice assistant to discuss the travel time, directions, and current traffic situation," reports Design Boom.

The idea of thinking machines may evoke thoughts of a Terminator-esque era, but the fact is that artificial intelligence, to an extent, is already a part of our lives and its presence is only set to grow. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that deals with making computers simulate human intelligence. However technical and geeky that may sound, AI is a far less mundane technology than you might believe. Right from medical diagnoses to driverless cars, AI has fundamentally improved the way people consume a product, which is why marketers bet on it big time. A 2016 survey by Demandbase pointed out that over 80 percent of marketing executives believed that AI would revolutionise marketing by 2020.

Hands on Microsoft has invested big in its Cognitive Services for programmable artificial intelligence, along with a Bot Framework for using them via a conversational user interface. How easy is it to get started? Cognitive Services, the AI piece, was announced at the company's Build developer conference in April 2015. The initial release had just four services: face recognition, speech recognition, visual content recognition, and language understanding. That has now been extended to over 20 APIs. Note that Cognitive Services, which are pre-baked specialist APIs, are distinct from Azure Machine Learning, which lets you do generalized predictive analytics based on your own data.