Artificial intelligence in the professions seems here to stay but Sue Bramall asks: is it anything but artificial? In a technology round table report published recently by one of the leading legal magazines, one of the panel of four declared that artificial intelligence (AI) "is unlikely to take center stage just yet, and certainly not in the short-to-medium term" with two other participants concurring. I suspect this quote may come back to haunt him, as the fourth member of the panel had already seen the future and quoted the developments in AI which had already taken place in 2015 between BLP and RAVN, between Pinsent Masons and Cerico, and between Dentons with IBM Watson. The theme of'artificial intelligence' is one of the hot conference topics for 2016 – so much sexier than'big data'. However, such intelligence is anything but artificial.

As the urgency to save the world's coral reefs increases, scientists using facial recognition technology and 360 degree underwater photos have announced the development of new software that allows them to pull comprehensive scientific data from their vast archive of digital images.

Nearly every music streaming service has a feature that gives you new music to listen to based on audio habit. Spotify has Discover Weekly, Pandora compiles a custom station and Apple Music is making recommendations a big part of its redesign for iOS 10. SoundCloud is looking to offer a similar tool with its new Suggested Tracks section. The company says the picks come from its "state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm" that keeps tabs on your likes and plays on the web and through the mobile apps. While SoundCloud doesn't specify how often the list is updated ("frequently"), it did explain that there's a good chance the some of the new music won't be found on any other service.

IHS Technology has announced that AI in new vehicles is projected to increase over 1700 percent by 2025. Car manufacturers shipped seven million AI systems in new cars throughout 2015, and that number is expected to be 122 million in 2025. AI systems are expected to be varied and perform multiple functions. "An artificial-intelligence system continuously learns from experience and by its ability to discern and recognize its surroundings," said Luca De Ambroggi, principal analyst at IHS Technology. "It learns, as human beings do, from real sounds, images, and other sensory inputs. The system recognizes the car's environment and evaluates the contextual implications for the moving car." Areas of development include eye-tracking, driver monitoring, natural language interfaces, and speech and gesture recognition.

This post is authored by Ollie Newth, Program Manager at Microsoft. Although text often contains highly valuable data for companies, extracting meaningful data from it can be a challenge. The field of text analytics utilizes natural language processing to extract meaningful structured data from text, and often includes areas such as sentiment analysis, entity recognition and linking, and text clustering. The Microsoft Text Analytics API is one of the Cognitive Services that can help you turn unstructured text into meaningful insights. The API is one part of the Cortana Intelligence Suite, a family of services that helps enterprises build large-scale analytics solutions.

Artificial intelligence is either the bright shining future of technology or an insidious threat that could endanger all of mankind, depending on your point of view. Now Google, one of the companies leading the development of AI systems, has set out five key challenges that need to be overcome with the technology - but they are somewhat more mundane than robots rising up to take over the world. Instead, the company sees one of the key problems as being how to stop negative side effects, such as a cleaning robot that knocks over a precious vase to get its job done faster. Google has published a new research paper highlight five challenges it sees as needing to be overcome to prevent AI and robots causing unintended harm. It also says robots need to be programmed in a way so they do not'game the system' – such as simply covering mess in a room with a sheet it cannot see through rather than tidying up.

Back in December, when Slack integrations launched, I wrote Clippy's Revenge about the potential of "smart messaging" to become a new platform. Since then, big players have done much to nurture that possibility -- as if on some secret, jointly agreed-upon master schedule. This looks like the battleground of the next tech war, and all eyes are on Apple this week. But how much of the bot craze is hype, and what's worth paying attention to? The frenetic energy around this emerging ecosystem is well-placed, but often confusing. After meeting 50 founders in this space, I'd like to offer a structured explanation of the emerging Conversational Economy, and propose some opportunities (for both big companies and startups).

Good news, everyone: Google is looking out for us! It doesn't want a cleaning robot to knock over grandma's vase. For some strange reason, the researchers chose to illustrate these dangers using the example of a cleaning robot and not a sentient superintelligence that wants to enslave us. In terms of elegance, they don't hold a candle to Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, but I suppose that's to be expected when you're writing an academic paper and not a speculative science-fiction novel that doesn't actually have to obey the laws of physics. Maybe the cleaning-robot examples make sense given that Eric Schmidt doesn't think very highly of AI fears.

A host of leading industry experts gathered to discuss the launch of The Drum's Cannes Lions special edition guest edited by IBM's artificial intelligence (AI) technology Watson, which used machine learning to channel the creativity of David Ogilvy, arguably the godfather of advertising. The panel session, held in association with Quantcast, saw assembled marketers listen in on the thoughts of Amber Case, a cyborg anthropologist who examines the interaction between humans and technology; Oliver Cox, solutions architect, IBM Watson ecosystem; Konrad Feldman, CEO of Quantcast; David Shing, digital prophet for AOL; plus Todd Krugmann, president of O&M Japan. IBM's Cox added that the latest issue of The Drum bore testament to this potential union of data-led machine learning, and the creative process. Meanwhile, IBM's Cox further explained how such an offering could aid brands' communication strategies: "Watson would not create a personality - it will help you create the personality that's best for your brand [with elements of human moderation]."

For most people, housework is the absolute worst, and it's kinda weird how in 2016, we still don't have anything remotely like Rosie the robot maid, who vacuumed the hell out of the Jetsons' house. Well, it might finally be our time, because multitasking entrepreneur Elon Musk just announced that his new robotics firm, Open AI, will be developing'domestic robots' that can perform basic household chores. To accelerate the process, Open AI will be developing the robots based on technology that already exists - basically, it's going to be taking off-the-shelf robots and customising them to do housework. "There are existing techniques for specific tasks, but we believe that learning algorithms can eventually be made reliable enough to create a general-purpose robot," Open AI says in a blog post. Open AI launched back in December 2015, and is headed up by Musk and Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator - a US company that provides seed funding for startups.