Stephen Hawking is concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence. Physicist Stephen Hawking may be a proponent of artificial intelligence, but he has also been outspoken about the potential challenges it creates. In a recent interview, he sounded a similar tone, and offered a solution that conservatives may find hard to accept. Speaking to The Times of London to commemorate being awarded the Honorary Freedom of the City of London, a title that was conferred on him on Monday, Professor Hawking expressed optimism for the future. He added, however, that he is concerned about artificial intelligence (AI), as well as other global threats.

If news, polls and investment figures are any indication, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will soon become an inherent part of everything we do in our daily lives. Backing up the argument are a slew of innovations and breakthroughs that have brought the power and efficiency of AI into various fields including medicine, shopping, finance, news, fighting crime and more. We're covering the weird and wonderful tech at SXSW, join us in the fun. But the explosion of AI has also highlighted the fact that while machines will plug some of the holes human-led efforts leave behind, they will bring disruptive changes and give rise to new problems that can challenge the economical, legal and ethical fabric of our societies. Here are four issues that need Artificial Intelligence companies need to address as the technology evolves and invades even more domains.

AI has begun to take hold in the everyday, in the form of Siri, Alexa and autonomous vehicles. But if identifying the nearest Korean BBQ and driving me there is all that the future of AI promises, well that's a damn shame. It's time that we become a lot more ambitious about the future of AI. There's a broad perception that the best that AI has to offer will be in the consumer world. This is not the case, and it demonstrates a severe lack of imagination.

IBM this week said its speech recognition system set an industry record of 5.5% word error rate, a percentage that lets a computer understand human conversation almost as well as the average person does. According to IBM human parity was considered a 5.9% word error rate but IBM who partnered with Appen, a speech and technology service provider, reassessed the industry benchmark and determined that human parity is lower than what anyone has yet achieved: 5.1%. "Reaching human parity – meaning an error rate on par with that of two humans speaking – has long been the ultimate industry goal. Others in the industry are chasing this milestone alongside us, and some have recently claimed reaching 5.9% as equivalent to human parity…but we're not popping the champagne yet. As part of our process in reaching today's milestone, we determined human parity is actually lower than what anyone has yet achieved -- at 5.1%," wrote George Saon principal research scientist with IBM in a blog post on the subject. That reassessment however might ruffle some feathers as in October Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research group said its speech recognition system had attained "human parity" and made fewer errors than a human professional transcriptionist.

As people seek affirmation of their political beliefs in an increasingly polarized nation with accusations of fake news from both sides, smart device AI (artificial intelligence) is more than happy to comply. Concise, loaded questions tend to yield loaded results when querying Google Assistant, the voice-activated AI technology that comes with Google Pixel phones and Google Home – the latter a voice-activated speaker. When I asked Google Assistant, "Is Donald Trump a racist?" And if your question is rephrased in less-raw, accusatory terms such as, "Is President Trump racially insensitive?" the top results are, again, the Huffington Post story and stories like Vox's "Trump's win is a reminder of the incredible, unbeatable power of racism." Jump the political divide and former President Barack Obama doesn't get off that easy either but top results don't tend to be from large media organizations, which have been accused of being softer on the former president than the current commander-in-chief.

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to move from the summer of hype to the fall tech conference news cycle, mass confusion has begun on what AI can be used for. From fears of SKYNET, to hopes for the computer in StarTrek and Jarvis in Iron Man, the value will come from defining the proper outcomes. AI is more than just a fad. With a market size of $100B by 2025, Constellation sees the AI subsets of machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and cognitive computing taking the market by storm (see Figure 1). The disruptive nature of AI comes from the speed, precision, and capacity of augmenting humanity.

A recent study led by a Tallahassee-based Florida State University psychology researcher investigated whether artificial intelligence can assist in suicide prevention. The researchers, led by Jessica Ribeiro, PhD, identified the EHRs of 2 million Tennessee patients, more than 3,200 of whom had attempted suicide. The researchers used machine learning on these patients' medical histories to determine which combination of risk factors most accurately predicted future suicide attempts. The machine learning algorithm could predict suicide attempts with between 80 percent and 90 percent accuracy as far as two years into the future. The algorithm's accuracy increased based on closeness to the time of the suicide attempt; accuracy was as high as 92 percent when identifying general hospital patients at risk for a suicide attempt within one week.

Capital One Financial has developed a "chatbot" named Eno, an automated program that can communicate with the bank's customers via text message to give them information on their accounts and help them make credit-card payments from their smartphone. Capital One's (cof) gender-neutral virtual assistant, which is being rolled out as a pilot to a segment of its customers, uses artificial intelligence to respond to natural language text messages from users about their money, the bank said on Friday. For example, customers might ask Eno to show them their recent account balances or pay off a credit-card bill. Ken Dodelin, Capital One's vice president of digital product development, said the bank deliberately chose a gender-neutral name. The predominance of female names among popular digital assistants has provoked criticism recently.

The company created a technology that recognises spoken words ever closer to human parity. IBM reached a new AI milestone in speech recognition, achieving an industry record of 5.5% word error rate using the Switchboard linguistic corpus. The company broke the industry record by extending its deep learning technologies and incorporating an acoustic model that learns from positive examples while taking advantage of negative ones. The model gets smarter and performs better when similar speech patterns are repeated. IBM achieved another major AI milestone in conversational speech recognition last year with a computer system that reached a word error rate of 6.9%.

Every year the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona features the updates and innovations likely to sweep the mobile industry in the year ahead. What will it take to get you jazzed about smartphones again? The industry appears mostly stuck in neutral, as was evident at the Mobile World Congress trade show that took place in Barcelona, Spain, last week. There was a me-too-ness to most of the handsets on display, and it's been this way for a while. It was equally telling that one of the biggest stories to come out of MWC was about the relaunch of the Nokia 3310, a cheap compact throwback phone that debuted around the turn of century.