That's the question many people ask when discussing implementing artificial intelligence (A.I.) in the workplace, fearing that computers will put them out of a job. Just this past September, Forrester released a report saying that 6 percent of U.S. jobs may be replaced by A.I. and bots by 2021. For employees, this may sound ominous, but it requires an explanation of what jobs, and what aspects of jobs, are evolving as a result of A.I. Companies across industries are beginning to leverage A.I. and virtual assistants to streamline communication with customers and increase productivity. The field service management industry, for example, is beginning to tap into A.I. capabilities to enhance workers' skills and improve efficiency. With A.I.-powered bots emerging as a new channel for customer service and engagement, this presents an opportunity for organizations to automate service and support for customers.

NASA is developing underwater robotic explorers that will search alien oceans for signs of life. The drones will be able to think for themselves as they navigate through the icy seas believed to exist beneath the crust of Europa, Jupiter's moon. Nasa scientists believe that water – the ingredient for life – can be found beneath Saturn's Dione and Ganymede too. There's compelling evidence that hidden oceans on dwarf planest Ceres and Pluto could also be home to mysterious extra-terrestrials. "Depending on the exact mission concept under consideration, autonomous underwater vehicles exploring ocean worlds will need to operate autonomously for days to months.

Despite 2016 being labelled the worst year ever in terms of politics and celebrity deaths, it was a pretty great year for the Montreal technology scene. We saw a lot of funding come in both publicly and privately, a lot of new companies being launched and the push for the city to cement its place as an AI and machine learning hub. I want to highlight some of the great companies that are being built in Montreal with a focus on the up-and-coming startups which are poised to have a HUGE 2017. Check out some of the rising stars in Montreal (in no particular order) that you should definitely keep your eye on. As part of the build-out of AI and machine learning in the city we saw the birth of Element AI, in mid-2016.

Artificial intelligence is an amazing technology that's changing the world in fantastic ways, but anybody who has ever seen the movie Terminator knows that there are some dangers associated with advanced AI. That's why Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and hundreds of other researchers, tech leaders, and scientists have endorsed a list of 23 guiding principles that should steer AI development in a productive, ethical, and safe direction. The Alisomar AI Principles were developed after the Future of Life Institute brought dozens of experts together for their Beneficial AI 2017 conference. The experts, whose ranks consisted of roboticists, physicists, economists, philosophers, and more, had fierce debates about AI safety, economic impact on human workers, and programming ethics, to name a few. In order to make the final list, 90 percent of the experts had to agree on its inclusion.

One day neural networks could help marketers with their online campaigns. Google's DeepMind is a tantalising glimpse of that future. It can not only recognise and analyse images in a video but in one publicised example, discovered cats. Yes, through its deep learning algorithms, without human guidance, it figured that YouTube is the home of cat videos. It identified 10 million of them (no doubt including my all-time favourite: keyboard cat).

Financial firms were the early adopters of the mainframe computer, relational databases, and have eagerly awaited the next level of computational power. Inorganics Intelligence helps Fintech companies in solving human problems, by increasing efficiency. Artificial Intelligence (AI) improves results by applying methods derived from aspects of Human Intelligence at a beyond human scale. Technologies like Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Neural Networks, Big Data Analytics, evolutionary algorithms, and much more have allowed computers to crunch huge varied, diverse and deep datasets than ever before. In early ages of Banking, bankers used to have personal connections to their customers to help them assist well for their decisions.

Facebook is applying computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) technology that it developed for visually impaired people to its image search function. Using its Lumos computer vision platform, Facebook will now enhance your image search results by actually "looking" at images and understanding the content within, reports TechCrunch. As Facebook explains on its developer blog, search today is based on tags and text. Images need to have the right tags and captions or search will simply not work. Lumos is a deep neural network, one implementation of AI that learns from experience.

The perceptual smart machine age: Smart machine technologies will be the most disruptive class of technologies over the next 10 years due to radical computational power, near-endless amounts of data, and unprecedented advances in deep neural networks that will allow organizations with smart machine technologies to harness data in order to adapt to new situations and solve problems that no one has encountered previously. Enterprises that are seeking leverage in this theme should consider the following technologies: Machine Learning, Virtual Personal Assistants, Cognitive Expert Advisors, Smart Data Discovery, Smart Workspace, Conversational User Interfaces, Smart Robots, Natural-Language Question Answering, Personal Analytics, Enterprise Taxonomy and Ontology Management.

Within a decade, our living spaces will be enhanced by a host of new devices and technologies, performing a range of household functions and redefining what it means to feel at home. The promise of devices that not only meet our household needs but anticipate them as well has been around for decades. To date, that promise remains largely unfulfilled. Advances such as the Nest thermostat by Alphabet (parent company to Google) and Amazon's Alexa personal assistant are notable, but the home-technology market as a whole remains fragmented, and the potential for a truly smart home is still unrealized. A tipping point may be at hand.

Holistic Salons are a series of AI MeetUps featuring talks by Monica Anderson about her research (especially Artificial Intuition) and its philosophical foundations. Initially these were held salon-style in her home but as their popularity grew they were made part of the AI MeetUps.