Anyone interested in the future of design should have a look at the new Batmobile. I was lucky enough to be photographed alongside it at the London Film and Comic Convention earlier this year, and my inner geek was impressed. Built like a tank and armour-plated, with twin machine guns mounted on a bat-black body, it's a seriously cool-looking piece of kit. But looks can be deceptive. The Batmobile certainly looked rough and tough, but it was roped off from the crowds so no one could get too close.

More than six billion dollars: That's how much health care providers and consumers will be spending every year on artificial intelligence tools by 2021--a tenfold increase from today--according to a new report from research firm Frost & Sullivan. AI will be everywhere--from diagnosing cancer to providing weight-loss coaching, says Venkat Rajan, who has the great title of global director for the company's Visionary Healthcare Program. "Prior to 2015, most of what was happening was sort of academic: pilot programs, exploratory, proof of concept-type stuff," he says. AI's ability to sort through scads of information, and remember everything it has ever seen, could enable a digital (and congenial) version of Dr. House, the brilliant diagnostician from the eponymous TV show, says Rajan. "At first, it's a complete mystery, it could be one of ten different things," he says, about the process in the show, and real life, called differential diagnosis. "And then he's able to sort through various issues, you know, illuminate certain factors on why it's not one of these other conditions, and he's able to pull something from memory that figures out ultimately what it is, and they can provide the appropriate treatment."

In last week's Chart of the Week, we noted that 1.3 million industrial robots would be installed between 2015 and 2018, and this would more than double the stock of active robots around the world. While many of those robots will be used in the automotive and electronics sectors, there are many other roles that robots will be filling in the future. Surprisingly, according to global consultant McKinsey & Co, not all of these jobs are low-skill, low-wage jobs, either. Mckinsey ran a comprehensive study of nearly 800 different jobs in the United States, ranging from CEOs to fast food workers. Between these roles, they found 2,000 individual work activities, and assessed them against 18 different capabilities that could potentially be automated.

If you're young and single, chances are you're rejecting potential dates left and right on apps like Tinder, Bumble and OkCupid. Hundreds of people are whittled down to a few in minutes. In the seconds you lingered on one person's profile, four pictures and an ambiguous job title, what made you swipe him or her to the right? First impressions count in ways you might not expect. How people sit or where their arms and legs are in the images they share seem to loom large in potential daters' calculations, according to experiments involving speed dating and an online dating app.

Tech and the elderly are often thought of as being incompatible. Everyone has spent painful hours teaching their grandmother how to text, and entire days have been dedicated to setting up a computer for an elderly person. But tech can actually help the elderly in numerous ways. From smart homes to wireless trackers, tech for the elderly can increase independence, alleviate the concerns of carers and relatives, and generally make life a whole lot easier. The elderly tech market should not be underestimated: the proportion of Britons aged 85 and over is expected to double from 2.5% to 5% within 20 years.

According to an EY report, the average age globally for a newly minted CFO is 42. Unsurprisingly, they're a highly educated bunch, with 27% of CFO's surveyed having completed an MBA and 27% holding a chartered accountancy qualification. Highly educated talent with years of experience usually doesn't come cheap. And for small to medium businesses, this could mean forking out a salary in the range of 130,000 to 250,000 to land themselves a C-Suite financial executive. So with CFO's trading at premium, is there any way the knowledge, analytical brains and strategic insights a CFO possesses could be mass produced for less? For companies turning over between 1M to 5M per year, deep learning, big data and AI is quite possibly the answer.

Business leaders are fast recognizing the potential of advanced robotic process automation (RPA) systems to boost the performance of their managers. These "intelligent machines" are able to perform a variety of complex tasks and free managers to concentrate on more strategic endeavours. Furthermore, their ability to understand and learn from the activities they perform enables them to provide managers with quick, well researched and carefully analyzed advice. These intelligent RPA systems, which use the latest cognitive computing technology, have huge potential to step up management effectiveness. To be successful, however, they must have the support of the managers they're intended to help.

Building technology companies worth tens of billions of pounds often requires one or two exceptionally talented individuals with strong computer science backgrounds and entrepreneurial spirits. Finding these people can be time consuming and difficult, which is why a couple of UK organisations have turned to artificial intelligence and software. In the last month, Founders Forum, a network of successful startup founders and business leaders, and company builder Entrepreneur First, have both revealed they are using artificial intelligence (AI) and custom-built software to identify the UK's most promising founders. Founders Forum, set up by serial entrepreneur and lastminute.com "An AI simulates what a human might do but at scale; with more data and no bias," said Dr Tom Bowles, data scientist and founder in residence at Founders Factory, a startup accelerator launched by Brent Hoberman.

What if five years from now robo-advisors are a thing of the past? That would seem counter-intuitive given the current trend and the enthusiasm for it, with technology accelerating as quickly as the many startups competing in FinTech and related verticals, and as the industry for robo-advisors is still in the very early stages of development. How then, could the future of automated financial advice be further transformed, taking on a different dimension that makes the current approach obsolete? By 2020, the market for machine learning will reach 40 billion, according to market research firm IDC. Combine that with the potential for more than 20% of financial services companies to be at risk of losing business to FinTech firms by 2020, according to a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) report from earlier this month, and a change in the landscape may be underway, accelerating as approaches to technology cause industries to converge.

We look forward to your answer to this and many other questions, and now the results... More than half (53 percent) of Americans feel that our quest to advance the field of artificial intelligence is important. Computers already create complex financial algorithms for retirement planning, and help people pick schools and life partners with the help of statistical analysis but when it comes to decisions concerning end of life care, this may be the right place for humanity to draw a line. If they had their own robot, a majority of Americans (53 percent) would use it for doing day-to-day chores, 21 percent chose problem solving, 17 percent said protection and four percent picked companionship. Two out of three Americans think that human intelligence poses a greater threat to humanity and 30 percent think that Artificial Intelligence does.