In 2016 bots and artificial intelligent digital assistants seem to be the Next Big Thing. Back in 2014 I posited that Cortana would be the intelligent, voice-engaged UI for our increasingly mobile experiences. As a mediator between our "will" and our apps, I thought that she would effectively make apps "invisible" as she became the ambient user interface of our mobile computing lifestyles. As Microsoft continues to evolve Cortana toward the vision the company sees for its AI digital assistant, I've seen that my 2014 analysis was not entirely correct. Nor was it entirely wrong.

If you have a few free minutes, try, for fun, filling them with Google Translate. And you need not be multilingual to enjoy it. Start with something straightforward: Enter an English phrase or sentence (idioms bring particular pleasure). Click a language, say, Spanish, and then "translate." Copy and paste the translated results over your original English phrase, reverse both languages (so that, in this example, Spanish is now where you begin and English is where you end), and again click "translate."

Artificial Lawyer caught up with Noah Waisberg, Co-Founder & CEO of Kira Systems. We discussed how Kira Systems got started, how it is different to other AI systems and where it's going. Co-founder of Kira Systems, Noah Waisberg, used to be an associate at Weil Gotshal & Manges, starting there as a junior associate in 2006. A lot of his work focused on M&A and he says he found himself spending a lot of time reviewing contracts during due diligence (DD). According to Waisberg, DD often amounts to between 30% and 60% of the legal bill law firms gave to their clients.

Will Artificial Intelligence disrupt business? The once-futuristic predictions about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will impact the world are becoming reality. Legendary futurist Ray Kurzweil has imagined advanced technology delivering everything from computerised brain chips to near-total automation of industries, and we already see the signs that AI will ultimately change the way we live and work. AI, where computers behave like humans, is no longer the stuff of science fiction. In many respects, AI is like a freight train racing down the tracks.

Google's artificial intelligence researchers are starting to have to code around their own code, writing patches that limit a robot's abilities so that it continues to develop down the path desired by the researchers -- not by the robot itself. It's the beginning of a long-term trend in robotics and AI in general: once we've put in all this work to increase the insight of an artificial intelligence, how can we make sure that insight will only be applied in the ways we would like? It's really less a killswitch than a blind spot, removing from the AI the ability to learn the wrong lessons. Specifically, they code the AI to ignore human input and its consequences for success or failure. If going inside is a "failure" and it learns that every time a human picks it up, the human then carries it inside, the robot might decide to start running away from any human who approaches. If going inside is a desired goal, it may learn to give up on pathfinding its way inside, and simply bump into human ankles until it gets what it wants.

Digital revolution has impacted 33 percent of the global economy, according to a study conducted by Accenture. The annual study report Accenture Technology Vision 2016 says that 85 percent of the survey respondents believe that the pace of technology change will increase at a rapid or unprecedented rate over the next three years.

Scientists in Japan reportedly saved a woman's life by applying artificial intelligence to help them diagnose a rare form of cancer. Faced with a 60-year-old woman whose cancer diagnosis was unresponsive to treatment, they supplied an AI system with huge amounts of clinical cancer case data, and it diagnosed the rare leukemia that had stumped the clinicians in just ten minutes. The Watson AI system from IBM matched the patient's symptoms against 20m clinical oncology studies uploaded by a team headed by Arinobu Tojo at the University of Tokyo's Institute of Medical Science that included symptoms, treatment and response. The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York has carried out similar work, where teams of clinicians and data analysts trained Watson's machine learning capabilities with oncological data in order to focus its predictive and analytic capabilities on diagnosing cancers. IBM Watson first became famous when it won the US television game show Jeopardy in 2011.

The young British coder whose simple "robot lawyer" chatbot has overturned more than 170,000 unlawful parking tickets in the UK and America has set his sights on solving homelessness by providing people with basic legal advice. An update to his DoNotPay bot works by asking users a simple set of questions about their circumstances, before advising them on the best course of action--often helping them draft an effective form letter to apply to their local councils for emergency housing. Councils have to take every letter seriously, and using Freedom of Information requests, he's researched the best ways to prompt them into acting on his bot's clients' behalf. The bot's creator, Joshua Browder, a 19-year-old Brit studying at Stanford University in California, told Ars that since the update launched last Wednesday "almost every local government in the UK has signed up for the website." "I can see on the back end that they are actively trying out the service for themselves," he added.

Humans are amazing creatures – driven by curiosity, intellect, ambition. The Olympic Games this month and the Nobel Prize Awards are examples of how our society reveres those who push their limits to achieve the seemingly impossible in both work and life. Digital advancements and new technologies are quickly redefining what is possible by accelerating human potential beyond the physical and intellectual capabilities of just a few years ago. But what can humans achieve with a little help from artificial intelligence? According to Erik Brynjolfsson, economist at MIT and the co-author of The Second Machine Age, "The accumulated doubling of Moore's Law, and the ample doubling still to come, gives us a world where supercomputer power becomes available to toys in just a few years, where ever-cheaper sensors enable inexpensive solutions to previously intractable problems, and where science fiction keeps becoming reality."

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