Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming very real--and at an exponentially faster rate. Moreover, those organizations that leverage AI in sync with those Hard Trends and Soft Trends that are shaping the future stand to make the most of its extraordinary potential. On one level, artificial intelligence is poised to help anticipate and address such critical issues as cybersecurity, civil unrest and even outright acts of terrorism. For example, using technology such as automated smart detection, officials at the recent Olympics in Rio were successful in maintaining security in a wide array of venues and locations. Closer to home, the Central Intelligence Agency's deputy director for digital innovation Andrew Hallman recently addressed the issue of anticipatory intelligence at an event hosted by the government and technology website NextGov.

This is my first discussion on the forum so please forgive me any faux pas but I have something really exciting to share! At work I had some free time and Azure credits so I decided to give their ML lab a whirl. I took a very broad and difficult question, although one that should have had a finite answer, and used some SCADA data to train a model that would be able to predict unplanned downtime in a well far enough ahead as to be able to send out an engineer to apply preventative maintenance. Common idea, I felt, and enough data to work something out. I won't bore you with the details (unless you ask, of course!) but something astonishing and totally unexpected came out of the analysis.

Natural disasters are out of the reach and influence of human beings. However, a lot can be done to minimize loss of lives. Artificial intelligence is one viable option that can potentially prevent massive loss of lives while at the same time make rescue efforts easy and efficient. To learn more, checkout the infographic below created by Eastern Kentucky University's Online Masters in Safety degree program. In the period between 2005 and 2015, a total of 242 natural disasters occurred in the United States of America.

One of the major trends I have been researching recently, has been the shift in interest towards Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its multiple forms and guises, and the potential it has to analyse vast quantities of data and quickly derive actionable insights. As we all know, AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning are not new. However, there has been huge investment in the space in recent years and the ability to automatically apply complex mathematical calculations to Big Data – over and over, faster and faster – is a recent development. With steady advances in digitisation and cheap computing power, no wonder people are excited about the possibilities. One of the areas of AI that gets the most attention is Deep Learning.

On this week's Tech Tent - your weekly status update on the technology business - we have three stories reflecting our current anxieties about the nature of our digital world. We'll discuss the biggest cybersecurity threat of the moment, the use of bots in the fight to get the upper hand on social media during the US elections and the ongoing debate about the risks of artificial intelligence. This week, producer Jat Gill and I attended a demo by security firm Sophos which left us both rather scared. James Lyne from the firm played a bad guy launching an attack on a company, while two colleagues played the increasingly confused system administrators trying to work out what was going on as chaos engulfed the network. We then heard that the principle weapon in the attackers' armoury was now ransomware.

Videogame acting sounds like the cushiest gig ever. Go into the studio for a few hours, recite a few lines of dialog, and cash the checks handed out by an industry that makes billions each year. But according to the union that represents them, the actors who bring you blockbuster games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto V are underpaid and work in risky conditions. And so the 160,000 or members of the Screen Actor's Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists went out on strike on Friday. The Guild has spent months negotiating a contract with 11 major publishers, and will not do any voice acting, motion-capture work, or anything else until their contract demands are met.

The best part of "Radio Imagination: Artists in the Archive of Octavia E. Butler" is the view it provides into Butler's archive itself. Butler, who died in 2006, was a bestselling Pasadena novelist and the only science fiction writer to win a MacArthur fellowship. She was also African American, and her novels reworked the sci-fi genre with far-reaching insights on race, sex and gender. The exhibition at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena features works by eight artists who were granted access to Butler's archives at the Huntington Library in San Marino. Their responses take a variety of forms, including sound and video as well as photography, drawing and installation.

Voice actors who are members of the Screen Actors Guild?American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) are on a strike after not being able to reach an agreement with 11 major video game publishers. The union unanimously voted that it would be on strike if an agreement would not be made by 12:01 a.m. on Oct. 21, 2016. After 19 months of negotiations, the deadline was not met. The list of demands from the 150,000 SAG-AFTRA members vary from stunt pay for sessions that are "vocally stressful" and an industry standard baseline rate of 825 for four-hour recording sessions to royalty payments for voice-over actors who work on games that sell two million copies. "In this industry, which frequently uses performers and understands the intermittent and unpredictable nature of this type of work, fair compensation includes secondary payments when games hit a certain level of success with consumers, not simply higher upfront wages. Secondary compensation is what allows professional performers to feed their families in between jobs. No matter what these companies are peddling in their press releases, this negotiation is not only about upfront compensation. It is about fairness and the ability of middle-class performers to survive in this industry. These companies are immensely profitable, and successful games--which are the only games this dispute is about--drive that profit. We have proposed a fair payment structure that enables the sustainability of a professional performer community. These employers have unreasonably refused that. The time has come to end the freeloader model of compensation and that is why our members are united behind this cause."

Driverless car are packed with state-of-the-art technology are considered information goldmines for an increasing number stakeholders, including car manufacturers, governments and hackers. In response, the American National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, NHTSA, which is part of the Department of Transportation is first ensuring its own, most probably exclusive access to this rich data bank. In the recently released Federal Autonomous Vehicles Policy, the NHTSA states its intention to oversee the development, regulation and policing of self-driving cars inside the United States. The agency is hoping to expand the guidelines' reach through collaborating efforts involving America's only two land neighbors, Canada and Mexico. Autonomous vehicle companies will be pushed by these federal guidelines to begin sharing data regarding their failures with even rival companies, and also the government. This will be considered a serious shift already faced with stiff resistance from tech and auto companies that enjoy significant influence inside their respective governments.

Elon Musk revealed the Model 3 in March, revealing details of the 35,000 base model including a sub-six second 0-60 time and a minimum 215 mile range. The basic picture of the Model 3 inspired a pre-order frenzy unlike anything seen previously in the car world, but now Musk has dropped what he referred to earlier as Part 2 of the Model 3 unveiling after a lengthy pause, as promised, and it's a doozy. Musk announced that all Tesla cars being produced as of today, including the Model 3, will have everything they need onboard to achieve full Level 5 self-driving in the future. The news means that every Tesla vehicle, including the Model S and X as well as Model 3 cars made after today will eventually be able to achieve full autonomous driving, with what Tesla refers to as "a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver" via nothing more than a software update at some point in the future. The hardware required to make this possible includes a sensor loadout complete with eight surround optical cameras, which can see up to 250 meters out from the vehicle on all sides, and a dozen ultrasonic sensors to assist the optical system.