Robots are taking over your job…and there's nothing you can do. By Amro Zakaria Abdu Human advancement throughout history can largely be credited to our ability to invent machines that increase our productivity and efficiency. Those tools allowed us to overcome the physical limitations of the human body and that of the animals we used, and as a result, territories were conquered, societies reshaped, and the dream of economic prosperity became a reality for millions. At the turn of the 19th century, the U.S. was a nation of farmers--39 percent of the population earned their livelihood through farming. The tractor was then introduced, resulting in profound changes such as the total replacement of work animals, consolidation of farms as seen in the increase in the average farm size from 60 to 200 hectares by the 1940's. Furthermore, the percentage of the population working in farming dropped to under 2 percent by the end of the century.

LOS ANGELES – An industry-backed autonomous car lobbying group on Tuesday urged U.S. regulators to go further to remove speed bumps than what was laid out in guidelines published two months ago. In a letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a Self-Driving Coalition founded early this year by Google, Ford, Volvo, Uber and Lyft hailed the framework but called anew for nationwide rules to speed the safe rollout of the technology. The group asked the NHTSA to "affirmatively discourage states from embarking on creating a patchwork of inconsistent laws and regulations that will stifle this emerging industry." Instead, the coalition contended, regulators should put in place a national framework of rules for self-driving vehicles. As published, the guidelines leave the potential for states to put in place overly restrictive or inconsistent regulations, the group argued.

One of the most popular acronyms of the decade - IoT actually stands for Internet of Things but due to the rising cyber crime cases in the past few years, many are decoding it as Internet of Threats. Cybersecurity Ventures, a pioneer organisation in the field of internet security, claims that cyber crime is going to increase the world expenses up to 6 trillion USD annually by 2021. Today, hackers are not only targeting the corporate data, but they are also threats to the security of various countries. Recently, they managed to steal the details of a deal between the Indian Navy and French submarine maker'DCNS' even before the deployment of Scorpène submarines. How Pandemic is IoT Threats From financial institutions to defence research agencies all are under the radar of malicious hackers and spies.

Cognitive systems - in the form of ANN is a technology that High-Tech Bridge is particularly familiar with, because the company's ImmuniWeb web security testing platform is based on machine learning technology. High-Tech Bridge uses artificial neural networks (ANN) and advanced human augmentation to implement intelligent automation of vulnerability scanning, but each scenario needs careful preparation, and unsupervised ANN is not on the menu, as Kolochenko explained: "We continuously aggregate knowledge and skills of humans to feed into the ANN. You have to teach the network to make the decisions. Our intelligence needs to be very specific, so we use supervised learning."

Small drones are already effective weapons for urban warfare--when armed with miniature warheads, these stealthy spies can turn into lethal assassins. So far their biggest limitation is battery life, but Boeing's patent for a drone battle station sets out to overcome that. The aerospace giant's'Vehicle Base Station' resembles Amazon's proposed recharging stations on street lights, but with a different mission. John Vian, a research fellow at Boeing, says the station's main applications are likely to be civil and commercial--used for firefighting and search-and-rescue, for example--but the patent has a decidedly military slant. "The unmanned aerial vehicles may monitor for undesired activity… [which] may be the placement of an improvised explosive device in roadway."

The robot is designed for education and aimed at children between the ages of 4 and 12, What's On Weibo reported. After this incident, however, parents will likely think twice before leaving a kid alone with this machine. According to Mashable, a statement on the company's website said the robot has sensors to stop it from hitting things when on its own, but those were disabled when the control panel was open. Over the summer, a robot security guard at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California, knocked over a child and injured his leg. Although Knightscope, the company that makes the robot, apologized to the family, it also insisted that the robot was actually trying to avoid the child when the two collided.

The saying goes: 'Never judge a book by its cover,' but that's exactly what new AI technology has been designed to do. A controversial paper has been released, which investigates whether a computer can detect if a human could be a criminal, by analysing their facial features. The results suggest that it is bad news for people with smaller mouths, curvier upper lips and closer-set eyes, as apparently these features suggest you could be a crook. The paper investigates whether a computer can detect if a human could be a criminal, by analysing their facial features. The researchers singled out three features that they suggest can tell whether someone will be a criminal or not – lip curvature, eye inner corner distance, and the angle from the tip of the nose to the corners of the mouth.

General Electric builds jet engines and wind turbines and medical gear. But the 124-year-old industrial giant is also transforming itself for the digital age. It's fashioning software that pulls data from all this hardware, hoping to gain an insight into industrial operations that was never possible in the past. The problem is that analyzing all this data is difficult, and the talent needed to make it happen is scarce. So GE is going shopping.

The U.S. State Department generates some two billion e-mails every year. A significant fraction of these contain sensitive or secret information and so have to be classified, a process that is time-consuming and costly. In 2015 alone, it spent $16 billion to protect classified information. But the reliability of this process of classification is unclear. Nobody knows whether the rules for classifying information are applied consistently and reliably.

While reading about the City of L.A.'s Security Operations Center's use of artificial intelligence, I became intrigued by the beneficial analogs that sales organizations can derive by implementing chatbots. The ComputerWorld article that I reference is not directly sales and marketing related. However, it does demonstrate the value of having artificial intelligence ala chatbots when trying to meet customer demand at scale for your sales, support, and customer service inquiries. That seems like an overwhelmingly large number, especially when you read that their command center is staffed with only eight cyber threat analysts per shift in their around the clock operations to handle threats in realtime. While they don't go into detail about their A.I. system, I can appreciate the huge uplift that A.I. gives to their threat assessment and response in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.