THERE IS SOMETHING familiar about fears that new machines will take everyone's jobs, benefiting only a select few and upending society. Such concerns sparked furious arguments two centuries ago as industrialisation took hold in Britain. People at the time did not talk of an "industrial revolution" but of the "machinery question". First posed by the economist David Ricardo in 1821, it concerned the "influence of machinery on the interests of the different classes of society", and in particular the "opinion entertained by the labouring class, that the employment of machinery is frequently detrimental to their interests". Thomas Carlyle, writing in 1839, railed against the "demon of mechanism" whose disruptive power was guilty of "oversetting whole multitudes of workmen".

From answering queries to predicting future of your relationship, a lot is already being said and written about Artificial Intelligence (AI). We've seen movies depicting the technology like Matrix, and even Bollywood doesn't fall short of explaining what's AI, of course with a fair share of melodrama. But, what seems fascinating and equally scary is a new report talking about an AI arms race. An army of machines may be decades away, and Anja Kaspersen, Head of International Security, World Economic Forum, pointing at a survey of AI researchers by TechEmergence (via Medium) points out how it poses an array of security concerns which could be curbed by timely implementation of norms and protocols. There are many questions raised about how AI could be a life-changing and threatening factor, and what it is goes into the hands of some malicious minds.

Stress is actually a bit of a buzzword. The initial definition was "the reaction to changes", which is why you get stressed also when good things happen, hence the distinction between good stress, eustress, and bad stress, distress. Since the 90's, stress has become a synonym of the everyday hustling, describing a life style. We focus on the original definition, evaluating the user autonomic balance that can be estimated from heart rate variability (HRV). The autonomic nervous system (the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems) has a direct influence over most of our internal organs.

With the news that Magic Pony has been acquired by Twitter, we are witnessing a crucial turning point - five of the world's biggest technology companies have now purchased UK-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies. It is no coincidence that at the same time (1972) we saw the birth of venture capital with both Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital raising their first small venture funds – which had similar characteristics to today's emerging European VC funds: small funds, thematic focused and highly supportive of entrepreneurs. At the same time, much has been said about the flow of capital into European venture capital funds and skills these venture team now have. The Magic Pony acquisition is an important part of the story in building Europe's emerging technology industry.

Some brands don't target well enough, while others go way too far, creeping people out. With personalized marketing, striking a delicate balance is the key. Personalization is an important skill for any marketer to master, but it's also quite a difficult one. There are just so many different ways it can go wrong. If your ads don't have any personalized components, people perceive them as not being relevant enough, making them that much more likely to use an ad blocker (provided they've heard of ad blockers).

JSW Ventures would focus on providing early-stage funding to technology-enabled startups operating in the education, healthcare, financial services, SaaS (software as a service) and enterprise software space. The fund will have an initial corpus of Rs 100 crore which it will invest over a three-year period. "JSW Ventures, the venture capital arm of the JSW Group, has received the mandatory clearances from Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), paving the way for it to begin investing," a statement by JSW said. "Technology innovation is happening across sectors, from old-fashioned verticals like real estate to research-driven work being done in machine learning and artificial intelligence," said Parth Jindal, JSW Cement managing director, who would be overseeing venture capital fund. According to JSW Ventures Managing Partner Gaurav Sachdeva, over the last one year, the fund has been actively working in the startup ecosystem, evaluating companies building innovative products, services or technology.

Google's AI Beating a Go Grandmaster is a way of judging the suddenly rapid progress of artificial intelligence that may show how far these technologies have come--and how far they may go. Artificial intelligence is a futuristic technology that is working on its set of tools at present. A slew of advances has been observed in last few years: Self-driving cars that have achieved a milestone by logging over 300,000 accident-free miles and becoming officially legal in three states; IBM Watson which beat two champions of Jeopardy!; and statistical learning techniques are conducting pattern recognition on complex data sets from consumer interests to trillions of images. These developments certainly raised the number of scientists or giants taking interest in AI, which has made it essential for developers to understand the ground realities of building AI applications. Every programming language is a AI language if you are adept in it!

With the proliferation of data and technology -- which has led to improvements in artificial intelligence and natural language interpretation -- it's now safe to assume we are rapidly entering the age of the chatbots. When we're conversing with a company online, we're quickly getting to the point where we don't know if we're talking to a human or a machine. Recently, I wanted to find out why my cell phone bill was going up. I figured online chat was the best way to see if my supplier could help. It started out fine, albeit a little fishy. I hope you are having a great day!

Artificial intelligence (AI) - and robotics - has been around for a long time but it has not yet disrupted white collar work very much yet - or has it? And surely our sales profession is safe - no robot could ever sell - or could it? As it turns out AI development has accelerated in recent year and it is now contributing considerably to the sales world and influencing significant change. I asked Tony Hughes to explain how and asked him for his futuristic view of what AI and robotics will mean to us in the sales world - and how soon can we expect it to impact us? He said that the impact of AI on sales was already significant - so much so that within only 4 years (2020) 85% of business to business (B2B) sales transactions will occur without human intervention resulting in the redundancy of about 25% of current B2B sales roles in that time.

"The tagline is, Do you want to be a machine learning ninja?" says Christine Robson, a product manager for Google's internal machine learning efforts, who helps administer the program. "So we invite folks from around Google to come and spend six months embedded with the machine learning team, sitting right next to a mentor, working on machine learning for six months, doing some project, getting it launched and learning a lot." For Holgate, who came to Google almost four years ago ago with a degree in computer science and math, it's a chance to master the hottest paradigm of the software world: using learning algorithms ("learners") and tons of data to "teach" software to accomplish its tasks. For many years, machine learning was considered a specialty, limited to an elite few. That era is over, as recent results indicate that machine learning, powered by "neural nets" that emulate the way a biological brain operates, is the true path towards imbuing computers with the powers of humans, and in some cases, super humans.