Artificial intelligence has a lot of prominent people shaken up. Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others worry AI programs and AI-enabled robots might replace humans in their jobs before the economy can adapt, or worse run amok in Terminator-like apocalyptic scenarios. Entrepreneur and Singularity University founder Peter Diamandis is worried about the opposite situation. He fears the field of artificial intelligence could be stifled by rules the way stem cell research was under Republican President George W. Bush, who in 2001 announced a block on federal funding for new stem lines. "It had the experience of really putting the kibosh on that kind of work," Diamandis tells Inc. "One of of the things I think is very true and important for people to realize is that you can't regulate against technologies. If an individual is working in AI or biotechnology or whatever the case might be, and you say'that's way too dangerous, we need to slow this down, we're going to put hurdles and regulations in front of it here in the United States'... All that means is that technologies leave the U.S.," Diamandis said in a phone interview.

How can Artificial Intelligence (AI) help companies operate in the 21st century? How might it impact organisations and employees? AI has been around for years, but now it seems that it is taking the business world by storm. According to software startup advisor Steve Ardire (pictured right), it will fundamentally reshape organisations. "Human capital will start to shift from mundane tasks and transactions to higher-order and creative work. Along the way, we will see massive businesses where the technology transforms specific job functions," he tells me.

A few years ago, Magnus Egerstedt was walking through the swarm robotics laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is associate director of research, feeling proud of the research spearheaded there, when a disturbing thought crossed his mind. "I began thinking about the robotics laboratories where people are doing things that matter. There's not even ten of them globally," Egerstedt says. "That's weird, because so many people are working on swarm robotics, but it takes money and people to drive research that matters. He immediately envisioned a way to give robotics researchers who aren't with those top labs access to top-lab capabilities. And he knew students at all levels, grade school to graduate school, could benefit as well. "I used as a model the Large Hadron Collider," Egerstedt says. "Physicists realized large particle colliders were too expensive to build separately, so they share.

Dave Hemker, CTO at Lam Research, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to look at some of the key issues on the process and manufacturing side, and some of the key developments that will reshape the semiconductor industry in the future. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: One of the big discussion topics these days is 3D NAND. How far can we go with 3D NAND? How many layers can we have?

Twilio, which functions as a communication tool for developers and businesses, will make both offerings available as add-ons through its recently announced marketplace, according to IBM. Developers who currently access Watson technology via Bluemix, IBM's cloud platform, can also use the two new Watson offerings. The new add-ons are designed to offer additional message enhancement capabilities through natural language processing to help businesses understand sentiment, keywords, entities and high-level concepts from text messages, with the goal of providing enterprises with actionable insights from the unstructured data, IBM said. The add-ons will be pre-integrated with Twilio's APIs (application program interfaces). Twilio add-ons are designed to make it easier for developers to integrate with other platforms and technologies, according to IBM.

This question has been asked on CV some yrs ago, it seems worth a repost in light of 1) order of magnitude better computing technology (e.g. Let's assume the goal is not hypothesis testing, not effect estimation, but prediction on un-seen test set. So, no weight is given to any interpretable benefit. Second, let's say you cannot rule out the relevance of any predictor on subject matter consideration, ie. Third, you're confront with (hundreds of) millions of predictors.

Wouldn't it be neat to have a brain that could read and understand all that information? There's this startup, Iris AI, that works to fix this problem by building an artificial one. This Singularity University backed team that wants to build an AI capable of highlighting new trends and interconnections of discoveries. This could help researchers in startups, corporations and research institutes to implement what is already out there. I first came across them via TED where they had processed my 2011 (gosh a lot has happened since) TED talk into their awesome system.

Are you skeptical about machines' ability to effectively aid social science decision making? Machines are becoming ever more intelligent, increasingly able to help humans make decisions across the social science spectrum, but cognitive computing is still in its infancy, with much unexplored ground ahead. Accordingly, government leaders who harness the power of cognitive computing are helping usher in a renaissance of simplified operations and enhanced constituent engagement. The secret to effectively using cognitive computing to aid human decision making lies in teaching computers to ask the right questions while taking account context and staying focused on what computers do well. Computers operate at great speed. But can we teach computers to be good social scientists?

One of Britain's leading computer scientists has criticised the "staggering sexism" in the industry, citing a visit to an artificial intelligence laboratory where a prototype of an "enhanced human" was entirely male. Ursula Martin, a professor of computer science at Oxford University, said that despite attempts to redress the problem, there was still an anti-female bias. She said that universities had attempted to encourage more women to enrol on science and mathematics courses, admitting that the institutions "did not always get it right" but they did try to remove obstacles.

Less than 100 years from now, robots will be friendly, useful participants in our homes and workplaces, predicts UBC mechanical engineering professor and robotics expert Elizabeth Croft. We will be living in a world of Wall-Es and Rosies, walking-and-talking avatars, smart driverless cars and automated medical assistants. But much work remains before robots will truly be integrated into our daily lives. In this short Q&A, Croft lays out the rules for engagement between humans and robots and explains why it's crucial to get this aspect right. What role will robots play in our lives in the future?