Could a robot designed as a sexual companion ever feel something like love for me? And could I, as a human with emotional intelligence, ever feel love for it? These questions challenge our definition of love, but they also challenge our understanding of both human emotion and artificial intelligence. Will intimate relationships between humans and robots ever get beyond just sex? This is a topic up for debate at the 12th Human Choice and Computers Conference in Manchester, UK, where academics and researchers are gathering this week to discuss humanity's relationship--sexual, romantic, or otherwise--with our AI counterparts.

Project Wing, part of Alphabet's X experimental laboratory, is testing the delivery of Chipolte burritos by drone on the Virginia Tech campus. SAN FRANCISCO -- No need to pinch yourself. This is not a dream. Google parent Alphabet really is delivering Chipotle burritos by drone. This month, a small group of hungry students and employees will get their burrito orders lowered on a winch from a hovering drone on the Virginia Tech campus, making the drone-delivered burrito of geeky fantasies a reality -- at least for a chosen few.

While the convenience of getting groceries delivered to doorsteps is enticing, it tends to be a costly luxury. The vast majority of Americans are still strolling down store aisles themselves to check items off their shopping lists. And it's this demographic that startup Basket is targeting. The company is highlighting price transparency to helping people discover the best priced items at local stores. It does so by leveraging the power of the crowd. Basket has built up a database of grocery store items and their prices by tasking shoppers with capturing that information.

The drones, which are all approved under the FAA's new commercial guidelines, can fly autonomously but will have a human backup ready to take the controls if something goes awry. When a drone reaches the hungry customer on the other end of the delivery, it will hover in place while lowering the burrito payload to the ground using a winch. The project's engineers will be testing everything from the drone's navigation systems to customer satisfaction. After all, what good is a drone if it can only bring you a cold, mushy burrito? While the concept seems simple, the data gathered from the project will actually help the FAA design a new system of low-altitude air traffic control that will be necessary once drone deliveries start catching on in earnest.

DEDHAM, MA--(Marketwired - Sep 7, 2016) - Rage Frameworks, a provider of knowledge-based automation technology and services, today announced that a leading multinational financial services firm has selected its Artificial Intelligence platform (RAGE AI) to drive improved results for its investment customers by using artificial intelligence to discover signals captured in a wide variety of data sources with Rage's innovative deep learning capabilities. RAGE AI significantly extends the frontier of deep learning and machine intelligence technology as it incorporates proprietary linguistics-based machine learning innovations to understand market developments in the context of individual companies and interpret those signals as a human would. After demonstrating via historical back-testing that the Rage AI platform repeatedly delivered returns in excess of what the firm's quantitative team was able to produce, Rage's solution was integrated in order to drive significant lift in the returns generated for the firm's clients. In fact, Rage has repeatedly shown that its deep background in computational linguistics and Natural Language Understanding can systematically discover Alpha by forming assessments of a company's financial projections that effectively predict future performance for businesses such as Wal-Mart (attached), where Rage AI predicted an upward trend in stock price months in advance. The RAGE AI platform does this by continuously interpreting unstructured content from over 100,000 sources and translating it into valuable intelligence.

DEDHAM, MA–(Marketwired – Sep 7, 2016) – Rage Frameworks, a provider of knowledge-based automation technology and services, today announced that a leading multinational financial services firm has selected its Artificial Intelligence platform (RAGE AI) to drive improved results for its investment customers by using artificial intelligence to discover signals captured in a wide variety of data sources with Rage's innovative deep learning capabilities. RAGE AI significantly extends the frontier of deep learning and machine intelligence technology as it incorporates proprietary linguistics-based machine learning innovations to understand market developments in the context of individual companies and interpret those signals as a human would. After demonstrating via historical back-testing that the Rage AI platform repeatedly delivered returns in excess of what the firm's quantitative team was able to produce, Rage's solution was integrated in order to drive significant lift in the returns generated for the firm's clients. In fact, Rage has repeatedly shown that its deep background in computational linguistics and Natural Language Understanding can systematically discover Alpha by forming assessments of a company's financial projections that effectively predict future performance for businesses such as Wal-Mart (attached), where Rage AI predicted an upward trend in stock price months in advance. The RAGE AI platform does this by continuously interpreting unstructured content from over 100,000 sources and translating it into valuable intelligence.

If you're experiencing a mental health issue, one of the people you probably least want to speak to about it is your employer. Disclosing depression or anxiety has long been seen as the last workplace taboo, for fear of repercussions. This is despite the existence of the Equality Act 2010, which protects employees with physical and mental disabilities from discrimination. But just over a third of workers with a mental health condition discuss it with their employer, according to a survey of 1,388 employees carried out by Willis PMI Group, one of the UK's largest providers of employee healthcare and risk management services. The research found that 30% of respondents were concerned that they wouldn't receive adequate support, 28% believed their employer wouldn't understand, and 23% feared that disclosing it would lead to management thinking less of them.

If Japan, home to the world's largest public debt, wanted to save a bundle, it would close the Bank of Japan. Auctioning off its giant neo-baroque headquarter buildings around the nation and pink-slipping roughly 4,900 full-time employees would cheer Moody's and Standard & Poor's and plug holes in the national balance sheet. That's not going to happen, of course. But imagine if the BOJ had closed shop 17 years ago, right after it first cut interest rates to zero, and turned its function over to a computer program. Would the artificial-intelligence version of the BOJ be any closer to 2 percent inflation than the well-compensated humans occupying its buildings?

It must have seemed like a revolutionary idea to diners of the 1920s -- people on roller skates delivering food straight to their driver's side window. Suddenly, the food that families were used to eating around a dinner table now arrived on trays or in bags, ready to be eaten on the go. Little did they know fast food was on the brink of explosion. Nearly 100 years later, restaurants are on the brink of another massive change: robot automation. The best estimates find that up to 50% of jobs could be automated by the late 2030s, with restaurant workers among the most vulnerable to displacement.

HBO has released the official marketing art for its upcoming sci-fi drama called "Westworld," which features an android "host" clinging on to a round beam with the show's double "W" logo on the background. It carries the new tagline "Every Hero Has a Code," and Entertainment Weekly reported that it's because the protagonists of this updated version of Michael Crichton's 1973 film are actually robots, while the humans who go to the Western theme park seem to be devoid of morality. The new trailer released by the network shows how the robotic "hosts" deal with humans' deception and shocking indulgences. The trailer shows glimpses of how humans run amok in Westworld, with violent shootings, sex scenes, a milk-drinking cowboy with holes in a body and several dead bodies scattered all over the street. Evan Rachel Wood's protagonist Dolores Abernathy seems to be right smack at the middle of the controversies hounding the theme park, but she voices over in the trailer: "Sometimes I feel like the world out there is calling me." Dolores is deemed as an anomaly in the world created by Anthony Hopkins' Dr. Robert Ford, and the trailer ends with her questioning him if they are friends.