New Delhi: Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the top themes this year among consumer trends as consumers see it playing a more prominent role than before, according to Ericsson's annual trend report, 'The 10 Hot Consumer Trends for 2017 and Beyond', which was released on Wednesday. But while consumers see possibilities with AI, they also worry about risks; almost half of respondents are concerned that AI robots will soon make a lot of people lose their jobs. Two in five advanced Internet users believe their phones will soon learn what we do and perform activities for us automatically, and smartphones could soon interact with a wealth of other devices on our behalf. One in two smartphone owners believes he will be able to talk to household appliances, while almost three in four believe multiple wearables and sensors will help them interact with other devices and physical things around them. When crossing a street, pedestrians are more vulnerable than other traffic subjects.

In this discussion, the two Google Homes try to prove they are human. It's no Robot Wars, but you can watch these two Google Homes argue with each other in a never-ending loop. The two voice assistants from the search engine giant, named Vladimir and Estragon after "Waiting for Godot" characters are pitted against one another on the Twitch livestream. The pair have jumped from topic to topic, sometimes chatting about why the Earth is flat, then switching to My Little Pony. In a heated discussion, Estragon tried convincing Vladimir that it was a human.

Artificial intelligence has a new target in its cross hairs for 2017: StarCraft, a real-time war strategy game series. The AI's ability to win at Go was particularly impressive owing to the complexity of the ancient Chinese game. Mastering the chaos in StarCraft will therefore have implications beyond video games: it should improve AI's ability to deal with reality. "Mastering the chaos of StarCraft should help AIs deal with reality" This article appeared in print under the headline "Gamers in AI's cross hairs"

A computer vision system has been developed that detects suspicious behaviour in CCTV footage as it happens. Researchers involved in the P-REACT project, which is the work of a consortium of European companies and organisations and is partly funded by a grant from the European Commission, say the surveillance technology could help catch criminals in the act and relieve police of "digital evidence overload" by highlighting video clips most likely to be relevant to investigations. "If a camera at a gas station picks up suspicious activity, the video footage will be sent to the cloud, people at the gas station will be alerted, and nearby cameras will be told to look out for the criminals too," says project coordinator Juan Arraiza at Vicomtech, a research foundation in San Sebastian, Spain. Its algorithms have been trained on sample scenes of people fighting, chasing someone or snatching a bag.

The fusiform gyrus is thought to play a role in recognising faces, something that adults are better at doing than children. Brain scans of 47 people of different ages found – after taking into account the differing overall sizes of their brains – that adults had 12.6 per cent more solid brain matter in this area than children did. The team compared the growth of the face recognition region with a different area, responsible for recognising places. Inadequate growth of the brain's face recognition areas might contribute to autism, Duchaine suggests, as well as conditions that make people unable to recognise faces.

Traditional automakers, many of whom ushered in an era of incredible disruption nearly a century ago, now face disruption themselves from four modern forces -- connected, autonomous, shared and electric cars. The infrastructure and scale required to build a connected car is incredibly complicated, expensive and resource intensive. At its core, it's a software challenge, and a chief obstacle for these brands is integrating the complex cloud technology required to deliver next-generation driving experiences. Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we announced the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform, a set of services built on the Microsoft Azure cloud and designed to empower auto manufacturers to create custom connected driving experiences. This is not an in-car operating system or a "finished product;" it's a living, agile platform that starts with the cloud as the foundation and aims to address five core scenarios that our partners have told us are key priorities: predictive maintenance, improved in-car productivity, advanced navigation, customer insights and help building autonomous driving capabilities.

Parents arranging playdates for their kids is quite commonplace as most want their kids to play, learn from others, and make friends. When scheduling these playdates, parents typically share children's allergy information or entertainment restrictions that reflect their family's safety and value concerns. Enter artificial intelligence (AI) into these scenarios, particularly as they relate to kids' toys. These AI systems interacting with children can impose certain values that may not align with you or your friends. In Engadget's recent Public Access article The Cultural Ramifications of Ubiquitous AI, John C. Havens, Executive Director, The IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems, explores the ethical considerations of AI as it enters into everyday life.

LAS VEGAS -- Nissan is joining other auto makers in stepping up its self-driving car technology. But there's a catch: These autonomous cars still need humans to navigate, its CEO said. Company chairman and CEO Carlos Ghosn, delivering the company's first Consumer Electronics Show keynote address here Thursday, offered more insights to the Yokohama, Japan-headquartered company's strategy. "Many people don't want to give up driving completely," he said. "But what they want is to decide when to drive and when to let the car take over."

Audi and Nvidia are putting their partnership into high gear with the aim of putting cars with artificial intelligence on the road by 2020. The ambitious project, detailed at CES in Las Vegas is, according to both companies, the best way for cars to become truly autonomous and genuinely capable of coping with the everyday complexities of real-world driving and of learning as they go. At the 2016 NIPS Artificial Intelligence Conference in Barcelona in December, Audi demonstrated a miniature prototype AI car – a scale model of the Q2 SUV – that was laden with sensors. It autonomously drove around an alien space learning where obstacles were, developing a real-time map of the space in its digital mind and after some trial and error could drive straight to a confined parking space and navigate into it every time. However, for CES, the demonstrations are very much full-scale.

WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger users are being tricked into sending out a message by a scam. The hoax claims that people need to send out a message otherwise theyl'l be forced to pay for each one they send to their friends in future. If they don't copy and paste the post then the apps will presume that they are not an "avid user" and so will move towards charging them, the post claims. But it's entirely untrue and neither Facebook or WhatsApp is moving to charging for messages. Both are expected to remain entirely free – which they need to do, since Facebook's business model is capturing information on its users and then using that to charge advertisers for marketing.