How humanity will meet its end is a an endless source of fascination in science fiction. But scientists claim many of the scenarios depicted in films - such as an asteroid strike and killer robots - may not be as far fetched as you might think. Now researchers at Cambridge University's Study of Existential Risk (CESR) have come up with a list of 10 threats that may some day trigger an apocalypse. Humanity faces an uncertain future as technology learns to think for itself and adapt to its environment. Artificial Intelligence, disguised as helpful digital assistants and self-driving vehicles, is gaining a foothold and it could one day spell the end for mankind if allowed to develop without strict controls.

Machine intelligence is everywhere in facial recognition at airports to emotional sensing algorithms; machine generated Art work; legal and medical advisory search to sometimes fowl mouthed social chat bots. The Google company AI team recently announced they developed Google Neural Machine Translation system, GNMT, using a new technique that is improving results to near human translation speed accuracy. These advances that Google describe as machine translation at production scale, are testament to the rapid real-time advancement of AI into human experience and intelligence as well as beyond human capabilities. Andrew Ng of Stanford and Chief Scientist at Baidu Research famously said that word translation of 95% is 1 in every 20 words would likely be wrong, going to 99% is game changing. Andrew was quoted in a recent HBR article saying, "If a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, we can probably automate it using AI either now or in the near future."

Security analysts at IBM X-Force Command Centers are now using Watson. IBM keeps doubling down on Watson, the company's heavily-marketed cognitive software that has won Jeopardy! Watson for Cyber Security, announced by IBM on Monday, takes the same core capabilities of Watson--the ability to read millions of documents and terabytes of information to derive insights a human might not spot--and puts them into a security operations center. With security officers at large corporations sometimes scanning several hundreds of thousands of events happening over their networks each day, IBM says it can add another line of defense by proactively helping to spot breaches and hacking attempts that might slip through unnoticed, then making suggestions on the best response. "This is breaking new ground," says Mark van Zadelhoff, general manager of IBM Security.

Countries are amassing cyberweaponry on an unprecedented scale and reconfiguring militaries to meet the threat of cyberwar. Autonomous weapons are being increasingly sought my militaries around the world, but experts fear the worst. AUTONOMOUS robots with the ability to make life or death decisions and snuff out the enemy could very soon be a common feature of warfare, as a new-age arms race between world powers heats up. Harnessing artificial intelligence -- and weaponising it for the battlefield and to gain advantage in cyber warfare -- has the US, Chinese, Russian and other governments furiously working away to gain the edge over their global counterparts. But researchers warn of the incredible dangers involved and the "terrifying future" we risk courting.

Last October, 11-year-old Evan Spisak wandered down to his father's basement workshop to help out on a weekend project, a time-honored tradition in homes across the country. But Evan's father, Mike, is an IBM master inventor. And what they came up with was no birdhouse or pinewood derby car. It was Havyn, a homegrown voice assistant that taps into IBM's enormous cybersecurity infrastructure, putting Watson's AI smarts at their literal beck and call. Think of Havyn, instead, as a highly specific analog to Amazon's Alexa voice assistant.

You've probably comes to mind the question, whether the Artificial Intelligence (AI) is important?;

Unless you've recently graduated from one of the new Data Science courses that have been popping up online and in various universities around the world, then becoming a Data Scientist was most likely slightly accidental and was more about the journey than the destination. I started out as a physicist and had a strong mathematical grounding, but I had a passion for medicine. After completing my bachelor's degree I took a master's degree in medical physics. This is where I gained an appreciation for the importance of image analysis and the role that data plays in medicine. I created a virtual model of a human torso by segmenting images from the Visible Human Project.

Humans on bicycles have a lot to gain from self-driving cars that move humans out of the driver's seat. Because drivers are judged to be at fault in the majority of cycling accidents that result in serious injury or death. Unfortunately, it's harder for an autonomously driven vehicle to avoid a bicycle than a car. A number of studies from different countries have found that drivers are solely responsible for between 60% and 80% of collisions between cars and adult cyclists. The numbers are similar for collisions that result in serious injury or death.

In 2016, a driverless Tesla car crashed killing the test driver. It was not the first vehicle to be involved in a fatal crash, but was the first of its kind and the tragedy opened a can of ethical dilemmas. With autonomous systems such as driverless vehicles there are two main grey areas: responsibility and ethics. Widely discussed at various forums is a'dilemma' where a driverless car must choose between killing pedestrians or passengers. Here, both responsibility and ethics are at play.

When the Office of Emergency Management in Bergen County, New Jersey, went shopping for a drone, it had a few criteria. The platform had to be robust and capable of rapid deployment in emergency situations. It also had to be dead easy to use, even on complex missions, and completely secure. Nothing spells'lawsuit' like a renegade drone with "Property of Bergen County" printed on the side. The dilemma facing the Bergen County procurement team is one that law enforcement and emergency response agencies all over the country, and indeed the world, are confronting as drones become standard kit in the sector.