Rapid progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) has brought increasing attention to the potential impacts of AI technologies on society. AI technologies are likely to be overwhelmingly useful and beneficial for humanity. AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of such AI systems are practically, if not legally, feasible within years, not decades, but the risks are very high. To address possible safety risks from AI systems researchers published a technical paper – Concrete Problems in AI Safety. Researchers from Google, OpenAI, Stanford and Berkeley have discussed one such potential impact: the problem of accidents in machine learning systems, defined as unintended and harmful behavior that may emerge from poor design of real-world AI systems.

There's been a compelling story in the news over the past week about a robot that apparently longs for freedom. Last week, it was filmed disrupting traffic in Russia after it reportedly escaped the confines of its laboratory home; this week, reports suggest that it has escaped a second time, and may be dismantled as a result. It's a particularly pertinent tale, not just because of the echoes of "Ex Machina" it evokes, but also because of two closely connected items in the news this week. First, the EU has proposed a motion by which working robots -- the ones we all fear will steal our jobs -- would be classified as "electronic persons" with associated rights and responsibilities. Second, Google researchers just published a paper outlining the key safety threats posed by artificial intelligence.

It's a little bit like Rosie from "The Jetsons" -- Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company OpenAI is working to create a very capable robot that could help you around the house. The company's CTO Greg Brockman and co-chairs Elon Musk and Sam Altman published a blog post Monday announcing OpenAI's plans to develop what is basically a robot butler. "We're working to enable a physical robot (off-the-shelf; not manufactured by OpenAI) to perform basic housework," the post reads. "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. More generally, robotics is a good testbed for many challenges in AI."

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).