Why is artificial intelligence, or AI, so much in the news these days? How big an impact will it have on business? What will it mean for jobs? What do ordinary people need to understand? These were some of the questions that motivated a recent salon dinner discussion that Techonomy hosted on AI.

Let's say you're writing an application, and you want to give it a conversational interface: your users will type some command, and your application will do something in response, possibly after asking for clarification. There are lots of terms associated with this technology -- conversational commerce, bots, AI agents, etc. I think it's much clearer to call it a Linguistic User Interface (LUI), by analogy with the Graphical User Interface (GUI) you could attach to the same application. Imagining your application with a GUI is a good antidote to potentially woolly thinking about "AI agents". You still need to wire the UI to the underlying application, and the conceptual model of your underlying application is still going to play a dominant role in the overall user experience.

The artificial intelligence market in the US is projected to grow at a CAGR of 75% until 2021 on account of increasing AI technology adoption, according to TechSci Research. Major consumer electronic device manufacturers and platform providers such as Apple, Microsoft and Google are increasingly offering these solutions in smartphones, tablets and smart wearables. "It's no surprise AI and machine learning are growing at a CAGR of 75%. When looking at the cyber security segment, it's a painfully obvious need. Truth is we are short over 1,000,000 cyber security specialists globally this year. The way the industry previously handled cyber security analysis, incident response, threat detection and remediation will simply not scale going forward. Today, firms have Managed Security Service Providers that have armies of analysts with'eyes on glass' and that approach is worse than reactive, it's simply broken," Yuri Frayman, CEO of ZENEDGE, told Help Net Security.

What if the scariest thing about AI is the vocabulary test? Sure, some people worry about machines putting an end to humanity as we know it, but that may be no more likely than a Mayan-predicted apocalypse. Artificial intelligence, though, may actually bring us lots of things we'll like: self-driving cars, caregivers for the sick, personal assistants that know exactly what you need, when you need it. Yes, there is math and science, and a lot of it, behind the current boom in AI research, products and services. But you don't have to have a Ph.D. to get a handle on the basic ideas.

NEW YORK--The first-year anniversary of the Windows 10 launch is still about a month away. But Microsoft executive Yusuf Mehdi announced today in a blog post that the next major iteration of the company's operating system--dubbed the Windows 10 Anniversary Update--will become available on August 2. Microsoft is encouraging folks to request it in advance. Indeed, ahead of July 29, the one-year anniversary launch date, anyone running Windows 10 on a PC today can request the upgrade for free, after which it will cost is 119. Either way, you'll still have to wait until August 2 to get it. Mehdi says that more than 350 million devices are currently running Windows 10 worldwide, with customer satisfaction levels higher than any previous version of Windows.

While Google was building an artificial intelligence that could beat a grandmaster at the ancient game of Go, researchers at the University of Cincinnati took a different tack. They designed an AI that could take on a fighter pilot. Dubbed ALPHA, this system recently beat retired United States Air Force Colonel Gene Lee in multiple flight simulator trials, as the researchers explain in a paper recently published in the Journal of Defense Management. The idea isn't to replace human fighter pilots. According to Nicholas Ernest, a University of Cincinnati alum and the founder of Psibernetix, a company that aims to commercialize the technology behind ALPHA, this AI may ultimately act as a kind of digital assistant that provides real-time advice to pilots.

One of the most comforting things about being an iPhone user was trusting that Apple wasn't selling my personal information to the highest bidder. But in recent years, tech companies like Google and Facebook have leveraged their user data to create impressive products that rely on machine learning. With iOS 10, Apple finally gets serious about machine learning, too, but it's not at the expense of its users' privacy. In this week's episode of The iPhone Show, we take a closer look at "differential privacy," the concept that Apple is following as it kicks off its machine learning efforts in iOS 10. According to Apple, differential privacy has been used to improve the QuickType keyboard, emoji suggestions, and Spotlight search.

What's to stop intelligent algorithms, programmed to make a profit, from learning to collude with one another in ways which bend market rules? Such a scenario would require regulatory oversight from the very cutting edge of computer science. The idea of artificial intelligence manipulating outcomes in the real world and then exploiting these on the markets is bestseller material. But there's fascinating scope for this to actually happen as computing power increases and algorithms get smarter. Someone who has thought about this a lot is Anthony Amicangioli, CEO and founder of Hyannis Port Research.

The future of human workers is not as bleak as many fear, says a recent report by research firm Forrester. Though cognitive technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotic automation will eliminate 16% of US jobs by 2025, according to Forrester, they will also create new jobs amounting to a 9% increase over the same period. The net job loss, 7%, thus qualifies as only a bit bleak. It's not quite the apocalyptic 47% job loss figure suggested in Carl Benedikt Frey's and Michael Osborne's 2013 report, "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?" Last month, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) came to a similar conclusion in a report titled "The Risk of Automation for Jobs in OECD Countries: A Comparative Analysis."

Proving that chatbots can actually be useful in real life, an automated lawyer chatbot has successfully challenged 160,000 parking tickets in London and New York. DoNotPay uses artificial intelligence to discuss the circumstances of the parking ticket with those who have received one, asking questions such as if there were clearly visible parking signs and then guides users through the process of lodging an appeal to the ticket using publicly available information. The 160,000 successful appeals are out of 250,000 seen, a success rate of a 64 percent, and is believed to have saved drivers around 2.5 million in fines. Perhaps even more remarkably, the service is completely free. "I think the people getting parking tickets are the most vulnerable in society," 19-year-old founder Joshua Browder told VentureBeat.