Just over five years ago, IBM's Watson supercomputer crushed opponents in the televised quiz show Jeopardy. It was hard to foresee then, but artificial intelligence is now permeating our daily lives. Since then, IBM has expanded the Watson brand to a cognitive computing package with hardware and software used to diagnose diseases, explore for oil and gas, run scientific computing models, and allow cars to drive autonomously. The company has now announced new AI hardware and software packages. The original Watson used advanced algorithms and natural language interfaces to find and narrate answers.

The labor market always seeks to remove inefficiencies, and it is true that whatever can be automated will be. This has been true since the 1770s, when textile factories became the first to succeed with mechanization, ushering in the industrial revolution and delivering advances across industries, building great fortunes and elevating the life of the average worker. Artificial intelligence (AI) will define the next industrial revolution, delivering similarly game-changing benefits to companies and workers through efficiency and improved human capital allocation. Investors recognize this, and the record-breaking capital flows into the AI market underscore the awaiting opportunity. However, with revolution comes uncertainty, and the consensus is that AI will lead to job loss.

Fujitsu Reports Boost to Todai Robot's College Exam Scores A revolutionary AI technique is about to transform the self-driving car. Here's how Google Play is using AI to improve search Nvidia Boom Thanks to Artificial Intelligence: Can the Chipmaker Keep It Up? Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

Google will buy London-based artificial intelligence company DeepMind. The Information reports that the acquisition price was more than $500 million, and that Facebook was also in talks to buy the startup late last year. DeepMind confirmed the acquisition to us, but couldn't disclose deal terms. The acquisition was originally confirmed by Google to Re/code. Google's hiring of DeepMind will help it compete against other major tech companies as they all try to gain business advantages by focusing on deep learning.

Google's streaming music service can now predict what you want to listen to next Why Google Bets Voice-Powered Devices Are The Future Of Computing? Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

Artificial Intelligence is the buzzword of the year with immense anticipation and excitement attached to it, but also often a fear of the unknown. So much so, that tech behemoths Facebook, IBM, Google's parent company Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft recently announced a partnership to discuss AI best practices. While there are the science fiction-driven angles of AI, like robots, self-driving cars, Internet of Things, and augmented reality, there are also more practical applications that affect business owners every day, especially those working in the virtual customer service world of online retail. Gartner predicts that by 2020, 85% of interaction between customers and retailers will be through artificial intelligence customer service programs. Brands are rushing to build out their customer service approaches leveraging AI to create accurate product catalogs, fine-tuned search capabilities, and truly personalized online experiences.

AI for recruiting is on everyone's mind these days with a lot of talk on how it's going to transform recruiting. Artificial intelligence for recruiting is the next generation of software designed to improve or automate some part of the recruiting workflow. The improving economy: The recent economic gains have created a candidate-driven market that's made competing for talent tougher than ever. This competition will only continue to increase – 56% talent acquisition leaders surveyed by LinkedIn believe their hiring volume will grow in 2017. The need for better technology: Although hiring is predicted to increase, 66% of talent acquisition leaders state their recruiting teams will stay the same size or even shrink.

Facebook is releasing tools to help improve Messenger chatbots. Earlier this year at F8, the social network's most important conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg detailed a big investment in chatbots, which use artificial intelligence to allow people to text with the software to help them do things like schedule calendar meetings or buy a pair of shoes. Now Facebook wants to help software developers who create bots make them better. On Monday, the company said it would bring free analytics tools to its Facebook Messenger platform, where the bots live. The company says businesses have built more than 33,000 bots on Messenger. With the new tools, bot makers will be able to measure the demographics of bot users, like age, gender, education level, relationship status, household income or retail spending.

Some scientists, such as Stephen Hawking and Stuart Russell, believe that if advanced AI someday gains the ability to re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate, an unstoppable "intelligence explosion" could lead to human extinction (Technological Singularity). There is no doubt that the studies and research on Artificial Intelligence, if only targeted to commercial profit, military power and technological speculation paradigms, represent today one of the greatest existential threat to humanity. There are many laboratories in the world developing technologies associated with AI, but only some of them make their progress known. But from the signals – albeit fragmented – we get, it is extremely easy to understand an exposure to significant risks, even if masked by the opaque veil of "modernity". In order to clarify and avoid generalizations: simple positive implementations of AI are already part of our everyday since long time. Every time we turn on a last generation washing machine, or browse on Google or Facebook, complex adaptive algorithms guide us and facilitate the task, learning our behavior or our needs.

Of the vast wealth of information unlocked by the Internet, most is plain text. The data necessary to answer myriad questions--about, say, the correlations between the industrial use of certain chemicals and incidents of disease, or between patterns of news coverage and voter-poll results--may all be online. But extracting it from plain text and organizing it for quantitative analysis may be prohibitively time consuming. Information extraction--or automatically classifying data items stored as plain text--is thus a major topic of artificial-intelligence research. Last week, at the Association for Computational Linguistics' Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory won a best-paper award for a new approach to information extraction that turns conventional machine learning on its head.