The exponential progress in the field of robotics has already been feared to take so many production jobs away from humans, and the latest edition to those victims might be the programmers. Researchers at the Google Brain artificial intelligence have designed a machine learning system that can develop machine learning software. Interestingly, when compared, it exceeded the results from the ones designed by humans. According to Jeff Dean, who leads the Google Brain research group, such exertion could supplant some of the work from the workers and enhance the pace of the implementation of the AI software in different fields of economy. "Currently the way you solve problems is you have expertise and data and computation," said Dean, at the AI Frontiers conference in Santa Clara, California.

NEW YORK - As soon as you approach Pepper, a 4-foot-tall robot, she starts sizing you up. Thanks to facial recognition capabilities, Pepper can determine your gender and age bracket. And as you begin asking her questions, she can draw from a vast volume of cloud-based information to give what she thinks are relevant answers. If you smile, she can tell the conversation is going well and that you're finding her answers helpful. If you don't, she might ask you if she's misunderstanding your requests.

Kristen Stewart is quickly becoming one of my favorite people. She's gone from Twilight to indie darling, picking some amazing films that show us she has way more talent than Bella Swan gave her credit for. Stewart is gearing up to debut her directorial debut, a 17-minute short film called Come Swim, which was inspired by a painting Stewart had previously completed. The film integrates the painting using a technique called "style transfer," which uses convolutional neural networks to have an algorithm change a video in real time. If we saw this on an airplane we'd probably throw up.

As AI enters our homes through smart home devices or tries to conquer our streets through self-driving cars, one need not be a Luddite to contemplate the potentially heavy implications of AI upon our daily lives and livelihood. The key to answering the question and indeed to understand the ultimate limits of AI is to ask if machines can really think. In this article, I list three tests drawn from three different disciplines to address that query.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: "The fundamental need of every person is to be able to use their time more effectively, not to say, 'Let us replace you'." Microsoft is striving to give technology human intelligence and capabilities, but CEO Satya Nadella says it and its rivals should divert efforts away from AI that replaces people. Nadella will join a chorus of tech leaders at this year's World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, addressing concerns that the current war for AI talent being waged by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook will lead to machines that replace, rather than help humans. Don't worry, robots and AI won't take your job: Well, at least not all of it Automation probably won't lead to massive unemployment, but governments will still need to prepare for major upheaval, according to a new study. Nadella says he's warned Microsoft and its rivals to steer clear of "parlor tricks" that show AI's power without preserving workers' dignity.

The insurance sector is one of the most old-fashioned and resistant to change -- so artificial intelligence will have an even greater effect. The insurance sector is one of the most old-fashioned and resistant-to-change space, and this is why AI will have a greater impact on that with respect to more receptive industries. The collection of data of new types (i.e., unstructured data such as reports, images, contracts, etc.) and the use of new algorithms are disrupting the sector in several ways. This is a really simplistic representation of the insurance business in the last fifty years, and I am aware that insurance experts might disagree with me in many different ways. There are a couple of further features to be pointed out: first of all, insurance has historically been sold not bought, which means that brokers and agents were essential to tracking new customers and to even retain old ones. In addition, it is an industry which is by definition rich of data because they collected anything they could, but is also one of the less advanced because either many of those data are unstructured or semi-structured, or the model used are quite old and simple.

Cyrus Radfar is a founding engineer of AddThis, which was acquired by Oracle. Mankind has a complex relationship with the notion of Artificial Intelligence. Tinged with both fear and fascination; the timeline for AI development is punctuated by cultural and historical events that have brought with them new speculation and theories. Mechanical men and artificial beings were a prevalent feature of Greek myth, including the golden robots of Hephaestus and Pygmalion's Galatea; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein introduced generations of readers to a terrifying idea of non-human intelligence; and, in more recent times, the dialogue has included the idea of computerized tech becoming a threat to the existence of our species. These recent concerns culminated in the 2015 "Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence", signed by over 150 people including Professor Stephen Hawking, and have been perpetuated by Elon Musk's occasional ominous remarks.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning and automation are technology trends dominating discussions in many different industries at the moment and cyber security is no exception. As cyber criminals become more advanced and the threat landscape continues to develop, businesses are looking to new technologies that can help secure their organisation in a more proactive way. According to Dave Palmer, director of technology at Darktrace, this move to the so-called "age of automation" is an inevitable and much needed one: "When you think about networks getting faster and big data, it's been just as useful for the bad guys as it has for the good guys, but machine learning changes that. This whole era of automation and machine learning is going to be about handing complex problems off to the machines to do some of that solving for us and bringing humans out. "Not that the attackers won't benefit in some ways from that, but on balance, overwhelmingly this is an area of science that is much more of benefit to defenders than attackers and that is really the first time we've seen that." What's clear is that the traditional model of endpoint protection through the likes of antivirus software is no longer enough, as Palmer explained: "People are falling out of love with the idea that year on year generation of improved perimeter defenses is making a difference.

The insurance sector has entered a phase of profound transformation. Numerous Insurtech startups--around 1,000 according to Venture Scanner map--have popped up to challenge the traditional model by generating more than 16 billion dollars in the last years from insurance companies. I believe that we will see a completely changed insurance sector in the medium term. But I consider it a joke for an industry conference to show a picture of a newborn and sell it as the last intermediary or the last client to have purchased an insurance policy. I'm convinced that insurance companies will still be relevant in the future, or will become even more relevant than they are now, but these companies will have to be insurtechs, or players who use technology as the main enablers for reaching their own strategic objectives.

CES 2017 is all wrapped up but there's still plenty of buzz around the latest and greatest gadgets and gear that debuted at the annual tech mecca in Las Vegas. There were thousands of new products to digest, between wallpaper TVs, next-gen wearables and drones, and "smart" versions of pretty much every appliance and tool we use in our everyday lives. As expected, AI took center stage at this year's event. Most products were AI-powered, "smart" or "intelligent." It's already part of the lives of millions of people, and most customers at CES expected to see sufficiently mature and useful applications of AI.