Ever since the industrial revolution, there are those among the working class who have held a fear of machines, and their potential to take away the jobs of humans. With the advent of the Internet of Things, connected smart machines have advanced to a stage where similar fears are resurfacing and some of them may be valid. Many are asking themselves, could a machine do their job? Perhaps the question that is much more appropriate, is whether machines will be taking jobs, in the near future? What Do Industry Insiders Think About Smart Machines and Their Potential? Smart machines that are connected to IoT infrastructure are becoming more common in every industry.

We've previously reported how AI is developing rapidly and gaining the ability to do things like defeat human champions at the game of Go, describe photos in words for vision-impaired users, detect cyber attacks and even write novels and financial reports. That's old hat – there's now an AI that can write screenplays. It's named itself Benjamin and its first film, a sci-fi short, has just been released on YouTube for the world to enjoy. Our new event for New York is focused on quality, not quantity. 'Sunspring' was directed by Oscar Sharp and stars Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch.

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry. The more I think about the recent breakthroughs in machine learning and deep learning algorithms, the more I think we are finally heading toward a smarter software future. Our smartphones are really not that smart when it comes to the intelligence equation. That is about to change. For years, I had been writing about the need for better predictive intelligence in our software.

In the pixelated cube world of "Minecraft," players can create almost anything their hearts desire. Now, Microsoft is using the popular world-building game to build and test artificial intelligence in the fictional environment. Microsoft has made a platform for artificial intelligence (AI) research using a modified version of "Minecraft" that will become available to the public following a limited release to select researchers. Project Malmo (formerly known as Project AIX) allows anyone from ambitious amateur coders to advanced computer scientists to build and test artificial intelligence in the "Minecraft" environment. "We?re trying to put out the tools that will allow people to make progress on those really, really hard research questions," Katja Hofmann, the project's lead researcher, said in a Microsoft blog post announcing the release.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba introduced its first automobile last week, the RX5 sport utility vehicle, set to be delivered to customers in August. The company called the vehicle, made with Chinese carmaker SAIC, the first "Internet car" in a news release. It will run software developed by Alibaba's YunOS division to connect with other smart devices, the company said. It will retail for 148,800 yuan, or 22,300. Alibaba in its announcement said the car will use the company's own e-commerce platform to deliver such services as finding parking spaces, locating gas stations or making restaurant reservations.

The K5 robot stands 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighs 300 pounds. Robots make cheap security guards, but they don't necessarily make the best security guards. Last week, a guard robot at Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California, collided with a 16-month-old and kept driving. It amuses shoppers of all ages, but last Thursday, 16-month-old Harwin Cheng had a frightening collision with the robot. "The robot hit my son's head and he fell down facing down on the floor and the robot did not stop and it kept moving forward," Harwin's mom Tiffany Teng said.

In the middle of the DRC Finals last year, SRI's DURUS robot slowly and steadily spent over two and a half hours walking 2 kilometers on a single battery charge. This was a Big Deal: DARPA had recognized from the beginning that the original version of ATLAS was horrendously impractical (at least in terms of locomotion), so they funded two different teams, one from SRI and one from Sandia, to design a humanoid robot that could walk 20x more efficiently. SRI's DURUS came very, very close to this goal, achieving a cost of transport of just 1.5 through an innovative combination of hardware, software, and especially gait control. The guy whose job it is to play with this robot is Professor Aaron Ames, who spent much of the last year moving his Advanced Mechanical Bipedal Experimental Robotics Lab from Texas A&M to Georgia Tech, which is why we haven't heard anything exciting about DURUS since the DRC. It sounds like they just got everything up and running a few months ago, and they're now ready to share an impressive new behavior: DURUS can now walk just like a human, while wearing normal (and stylish) human shoes. You may remember that back at the DRC Finals, we asked Ames what he was hoping to do next with DURUS.

I was very honored to be featured on the Microsoft Jobs blog and talk with them about the cool research we are able to do in machine learning at Microsoft. There is also a writeup on the What If page and a video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v Iu8OvGeLL5c.

Position: Data Scientist _Contact_: To apply and submit your task, please visit www.axa.co.uk/careers and do Advanced search for job reference AXAI405, or Apply at this link. With a presence in 59 countries, and 160,000 employees serving the needs of 103 million customers, AXA is big. In fact, we're the world's number one insurance brand, and one of the Sunday Times Top 25 Best Big Companies to work for. But we're not too big to care for – or listen to - everyone who works with us. You see, we value your ideas and your experience.

Arun Sundararajan is a professor of business at New York University. This excerpt is from his new book, The Sharing Economy, will be published in June 2016. A potential guest recently sued online home rental service over allegations of racial discrimination by some of its hosts. While the company has since reiterated its commitment to rooting out racial bias, including hiring a former ACLU head to oversee its efforts, the case highlights a broader set of societal challenges we will face as the sharing economy expands into new services.. In my new book, The Sharing Economy, I discuss how platforms like Airbnb and Lyft blurs the lines between our personal and professional lives, creating gray areas for business owners, consumers and governments.