Take a breath because the future might not be as bleak as you expect. A report from Forrester Research predicts that artificial intelligence systems, which include robots, automation, smart machines and machine learning systems, will replace 7% of U.S. jobs by 2025. That's a net reduction because the analyst firm predicts that technology will replace 16% of U.S. jobs but will create the equivalent of another 9%, leaving a 7% total reduction. These numbers might reinforce people's concerns that businesses will be quick to replace people, who need vacation time and pricey health care, with robots. Forrester analysts Craig LeClair and J.P. Gownder note in the study, which was released Wednesday, that robotics will replace some human workers in their jobs, but technology will also create new, more interesting jobs for people.

Charles Radclyffe, a serial entrepreneur who has focused his career on solving tough technology challenges for some of the world's largest organisations, spoke about data philosophy and mentioned how technology is slowly changing the world and could cause a wealth distribution imbalance. The Big Data Summit (Malta) is the first event of its kind to be held in Malta aimed at bringing together an international group of business leaders, policy makers and technology leaders to discuss the future of the global economy and how big data and advanced analytics is already transforming the business world as we know it. This major event brings together thought leaders from some of the key players in Big Data today including Tableau, Qlik, Microsoft, Zendesk and Salesforce as well as accomplished independent international speakers from a variety of industries, including professional services, IT, Telco, iGaming, Academia as well as areas where some of the major breakthroughs are being made like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Mr Radclyffe spoke about data philosophy and data ethics. He said that the consequence of what we are doing through technology today will have the furthest reaching impact to date.

This week, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration announced new safety regulations for unmanned aircraft weighing less than 55 pounds (25 kilograms) that are conducting non-hobbyist operations. In other words, the pilots and drones shooting your wedding video, trailing a snowboarder to catch the best trick as seen from above, or taking aerial footage of the horse ranch for sale in the next county now have dictates to follow. The general sUAS (small unmanned aircraft systems) rules that the FAA announced last year did a reasonable job of regulating small drones flown by hobbyists for fun. However, the rules did not make life any easier for anyone who wanted to fly a drone while making money; commercial operators were still required to register separately through a cumbersome and antiquated process involving paper. The FAA promised that sometime in the spring of this year, they'd announce a streamlined registration process for commercial sUAS.

Guest Commentary: The future of human consciousness will be a hybrid affair. We will live and work in a ubiquitous computing environment, where physical reality and a pervasive digital layer mix seamlessly according to the logic of software and the richness of highly contextual data. This is mixed reality (MR) -- and it will soon simply be reality: Projected onto our mind's eye, always on, always connected, and deeply personalized. It will be delivered first through a head-mounted display, and ultimately embedded in our perception via subtler inputs. The resulting human network will be a massive, dynamic system capable of generating enormous value for humankind, as we embrace our cyborg future and the superpowers it enables.

The future of human consciousness will be a hybrid affair. We will live and work in a ubiquitous computing environment, where physical reality and a pervasive digital layer mix seamlessly according to the logic of software and the richness of highly contextual data. This is mixed reality (MR)--and it will soon simply be reality: projected onto our mind's eye, always on, always connected, and deeply personalized. It will be delivered first through a head-mounted display, and ultimately embedded in our perception via subtler inputs. The resulting human network will be a massive, dynamic system capable of generating enormous value for humankind, as we embrace our cyborg future and the superpowers it enables.

Are you tired of hearing about artificial intelligence yet? Well, I have some bad news. It's only going to become the most important thing in our lives. Every once in a while you read an article that completely changes and overwhelms the way you think about something. Today, for me, it was The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 1 and Part 2. These are very long articles, so I have taken the liberty of extracting the best parts for a quick skim.

If you're a child of the '80s like me, you might recognize this famous line from the movie WarGames. This innocent-sounding question comes not from one of the movie's human stars, but from a military super-computer named Joshua, after a bored high school student, played by Matthew Broderick, accesses the computer's hard drive. Thinking he's hacked into a video game company, Broderick's character accepts Joshua's challenge and chooses the most intriguing game he can find: global thermonuclear war. Joshua is an intelligent computer programmed to learn through simulations like the one Broderick's character initiates. And because the computer actually does control the arsenal of U.S. nuclear weapons, it's a "game" that puts the planet on the brink of World War III.

Outcomes Based Healthcare and Big Data Partnership have won an Innovate UK grant for a 1m project to change healthcare's approach to diabetes. In partnership, these two organisations will be creating "a dashboard and software product for doctors to predict and pre-treat for complications of diabetes." The press release explains that this will utilise health and non-health data in conjunction with advanced Machine Learning and analytics techniques to develop a system that can identify the progression of the disease. This will come from a local London population. The reason this Big Data and Machine Learning approach is interesting though, is it offers a top-line independent perspective on a difficult disease.

Gensim users and developers have shaped the newest release 0.13.0 through their comments, requests and Python code contributions. The release includes new features like Word Movers Distance (WMD) and offers a new tool which is used to tune Topic Models. RaRe Technologies today announced a major update of the software package Gensim, an open source machine learning toolkit for understanding human language. Gensim users and developers have shaped the newest release 0.13.0. This release includes new features like Word Movers' Distance (WMD)*, a novel distance function between unstructured text documents, plus new Tutorials and Quickstarts.

When beginners get started with machine learning, the inevitable question is "what are the prerequisites? What do I need to know to get started?" You need to master math. A list like this is enough to intimidate anyone but a person with an advanced math degree. It's unfortunate, because I think a lot of beginners lose heart and are scared away by this advice.