Everyone wants to keep ahead of the technology curve, whether it's being'in-the-know' or as a vital part of your business, to allow for effective future planning or perhaps to start building systems and products based on that technology. So how do you know what that next big thing will be? Were people betting on touch interfaces in 2002? Not me, I was in a Macromedia Flash phase and couldn't possibly imagine anything beating a vector shape moving across the screen at 12 frames per second. I am not that same guy anymore.

In the last couple of years, magic started happening in AI. Techniques started working, or started working much better, and new techniques have appeared, especially around machine learning ('ML'), and when those were applied to some long-standing and important use cases we started getting dramatically better results. For example, the error rates for image recognition, speech recognition and natural language processing have collapsed to close to human rates, at least on some measurements. So you can say to your phone: 'show me pictures of my dog at the beach' and a speech recognition system turns the audio into text, natural language processing takes the text, works out that this is a photo query and hands it off to your photo app, and your photo app, which has used ML systems to tag your photos with'dog' and'beach', runs a database query and shows you the tagged images. There are really two things going on here - you're using voice to fill in a dialogue box for a query, and that dialogue box can run queries that might not have been possible before.

You, client! may not be science fiction for much longer. On both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere, British authors Richard and Daniel Susskind and others predict Artificial Intelligence is on the cusp of changing the legal profession more than any other technology. We've already seen the transformation triggered by word-processing, the Internet and e-mail, but the high hourly rates of legal professionals and the exorbitant expense of court time demand more reform. The B.C. government has been an early adopter of software solutions and the province already has a handful of dispute-resolution and legal platforms intended to make access to legal services and justice easier and cheaper. The next development, however, is heralded by the arrival of "digital legal advisers" -- the progeny of Deep Blue, which destroyed the chess hegemony of humanity, and Watson, which ruined Jeopardy!

Similar concerns arise around "open artificial (AI) intelligence ecosystems" - the next step up from systems like Amazon's Echo, Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana. Combining "listening" devices, cloud computing and the Internet of Things, machines are increasingly combining the capacity to understand normal conversation with the ability to take action on what they hear. This is a truly transformative technology platform. But what happens when these AI ecosystems begin to listen in on private conversations and share them with others? Or independently decide what's best for you?

As expected, Apple previewed iOS 10 at this week's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. And as expected, upgrades to Apple's Siri digital assistant dominated the presentation. In a bid to compete against rivals such as Google and Amazon that are making hard pushes into the artificial-intelligence realm, Apple has opened Siri's API to third-party developers, potentially boosting its functionality. Uber and WhatsApp are early partners in this effort--if you ever wanted to order a cab or send a text massage to a friend via voice command, your chance is coming soon. On the desktop, Siri can help you send messages, find files, and execute some background tasks.)

Computational linguists and computer scientists, among them University of Texas professor Jason Baldridge, have been working for over fifty years toward algorithmic understanding of human language. They are, however, doing a pretty good job with important tasks such as entity recognition, relation extraction, topic modeling, and summarization. These tasks are accomplished via natural language processing (NLP) technologies, implementing linguistic, statistical, and machine learning methods. Voice response and personal assistants -- Siri, Google Now, Microsoft Cortana, Amazon Alexa -- rely on NLP to interpret requests and formulate appropriate responses. Search and recommendation engines apply NLP, as do applications ranging from pharmaceutical drug discovery to national security counter-terrorism systems.

Artificial intelligence is either the bright shining future of technology or an insidious threat that could endanger all of mankind, depending on your point of view. Now Google, one of the companies leading the development of AI systems, has set out five key challenges that need to be overcome with the technology - but they are somewhat more mundane than robots rising up to take over the world. Instead, the company sees one of the key problems as being how to stop negative side effects, such as a cleaning robot that knocks over a precious vase to get its job done faster. Google has published a new research paper highlight five challenges it sees as needing to be overcome to prevent AI and robots causing unintended harm. It also says robots need to be programmed in a way so they do not'game the system' – such as simply covering mess in a room with a sheet it cannot see through rather than tidying up. Avoiding Negative Side Effects: How can we ensure that an AI system will not disturb its environment in negative ways while pursuing its goals, e.g. a cleaning robot knocking over a vase because it can clean faster by doing so?

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Artificial intelligence is either the bright shining future of technology or an insidious threat that could endanger all of mankind, depending on your point of view. Now Google, one of the companies leading the development of AI systems, has set out five key challenges that need to be overcome with the technology - but they are somewhat more mundane than robots rising up to take over the world. Instead, the company sees one of the key problems as being how to stop negative side effects, such as a cleaning robot that knocks over a precious vase to get its job done faster. Google has published a new research paper highlight five challenges it sees as needing to be overcome to prevent AI and robots causing unintended harm. It also says robots need to be programmed in a way so they do not'game the system' – such as simply covering mess in a room with a sheet it cannot see through rather than tidying up.

Back in December, when Slack integrations launched, I wrote Clippy's Revenge about the potential of "smart messaging" to become a new platform. Since then, big players have done much to nurture that possibility -- as if on some secret, jointly agreed-upon master schedule. This looks like the battleground of the next tech war, and all eyes are on Apple this week. But how much of the bot craze is hype, and what's worth paying attention to? The frenetic energy around this emerging ecosystem is well-placed, but often confusing. After meeting 50 founders in this space, I'd like to offer a structured explanation of the emerging Conversational Economy, and propose some opportunities (for both big companies and startups).