The debate over artificial intelligence has divided some of Silicon Valley's brightest minds. Companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon are embracing AI, integrating it into their core products. Larry Page, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, argued in 2014 that AI could bring economic benefits. "When we have computers that can do more and more jobs, it's going to change how we think about work," Page told The Financial Times. Other major industry figures warn that artificial intelligence could spin out of control. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, once said AI could pose the "biggest existential threat" to mankind.

The debate over artificial intelligence has divided some of Silicon Valley's brightest minds. Companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon are embracing AI, integrating it into their core products. Larry Page, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, argued in 2014 that AI could bring economic benefits. "When we have computers that can do more and more jobs, it's going to change how we think about work," Page told The Financial Times. Other major industry figures warn that artificial intelligence could spin out of control. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, once said AI could pose the "biggest existential threat" to mankind.

What kind of person are you, really? What better way to find out than to ask someone who's not a person. As part of the NYCxDesign festival, IBM Watson painted me a portrait of who I really am deep down inside … on Twitter. IBM Watson is a computer program that parses natural language to analyze data. Different versions of Watson have gone on to become a doctor, a college teaching assistant, a world-class chef, as well as a Jeopardy!

Chances are the entity managing your favorite smartphone app or Internet service isn't a person. Algorithms are setting the price of your airline ticket and hailing your Uber driver. And we're only at the beginning of a transition that is going to make the algorithms behind the software people interact with better able to understand and react to humans, technologists at a gathering of Seattle's burgeoning artificial-intelligence industry said Wednesday. "Every application that is going to get built, starting today and into the future, is going to be an intelligent app," said S. "Soma" Somasegar, a venture partner with Madrona Venture Group and a former Microsoft executive. The event, hosted by Somasegar's Seattle-based venture-capital firm, was held to highlight the cluster of companies in the region working on the cutting edge of intelligent software, including in the discipline dubbed machine learning.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is something of a buzz-phrase across the tech industry these days - but Microsoft's Dave Coplin says that it will come to have a profound impact on society as we know it. In his words, AI "will change everything". Coplin, the company's chief envisioning officer in the UK, was speaking a few days ago at an AI conference in London, where he described it as "the most important technology that anybody on the planet is working on today." "This technology will change how we relate to technology," he said. "It will change how we relate to each other. I would argue that it will even change how we perceive what it means to be human."

Sure, a NYC-based on-demand insurance app powered by artificial intelligence, launched with 2.6m in seed funding. Investors included ff Venture Capital, Montage Ventures, and Fosun Kinzon Capital (Fosun Group). Founded in late 2014, Sure offers individual accident, life, property, casualty, and warranty insurance policies on-demand and direct to consumers through their mobile devices. The platform uses a Robo-Broker driven approach to empower consumers with the ability to personalize their insurance needs via mobile based on location, context and behavior and eliminate the built-in limitations of the industry driven largely by not customized recommendations from brokers. The company is led by CEO and co-founder Wayne Slavin.

The New York Times has a lead article on collapsing US merger deals in 2016 so far. While last year set a record for the amount of money spent on corporate mergers -- 4.7 trillion -- this year is so far setting a very different record: the dollar amount of deals that have come undone, the famous paper writes. Since the beginning of January, 400 billion worth of corporate mergers have been withdrawn in the United States, almost three times the previous record for the same period, set in 2007, according to Dealogic, which analyzes such data. In the same paper, reporter John Markoff writes that the Pentagon is turning to Silicon Valley for the edge in Artificial Intelligence. On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter made his fourth trip to the tech industry's heartland since being named to his post last year.

A couple of years ago, Andy Rubin--the celebrated creator of Android and until recently the head of Google's mobile Internet efforts--helped his wife, Rie, build a bakery in a decommissioned train station in Los Altos, California. They called it Voyageur du Temps, French for time traveler. As the name suggests, the bakery conveys visitors to an earlier era--by painstakingly re-creating the flavors and textures of classic European pastry. To pull this off, the Rubins went so far as to hire chefs from Japan, where traditional baking techniques are rigorously studied, and to purchase a rare Bongard Cervap oven, one of only two on the West Coast. The project was typical Rubin, in that it involved throwing an almost comical amount of money, energy, and engineering talent at a hobby, just for the fun of it. But it was also atypical Rubin, in that he usually marshals such resources to build artifacts from the future--like the robotic arm and the retinal scanner he's installed in his house. Even at his backward- looking bakery, Rubin couldn't resist adding some forward-leaning touches. He began writing software for a "closed cash" device that could receive payment, dole out change, and log transactions without a cashier's intervention. And he built a private meeting room in the back, complete with a homemade magnetized lock system.

Machine learning, a method of data analysis that automates analytical model building, is at the top of the "hype curve" for emerging technologies and is one of the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2016, according to Gartner. It's safe to say that most of us are already interacting with machine learning applications on a daily basis whether it's Apple's Siri, Facebook's face detection, Netflix personalized recommendations, or iOS's autocorrect. And from a business perspective, basically any organization that gathers data with the intention of acting on it can benefit from machine learning. But what can we learn from this growing trend? What can we do with such a widely applicable technology and how can we maximize its potential?

Automation and industrial robots have been in the manufacturing and related industries for decades, with the usage prevalent in shop floors and assembly lines. In 2008, a firm called Kiva Systems invented suitcase-like machines that would park underneath racks and move them around in the warehouse. Raffaello D' Andrea, the co-founder of Kiva, said: "You don't have to walk over to the shelves to get things -- the shelves come to you." Amazon acquired Kiva Systems four years later to obtain the technology to sort, organise and transport Amazon's massive inventory. Without a doubt, technology has reduced the need for human labour, especially in manual and routine tasks. It has largely done its job -- simplifying tasks and minimising errors -- although at the expense of eliminating low-skilled factory workers.