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A "tech tax" is necessary if the world is to avoid a dystopian future in which AI leads to a concentration of global wealth in the hands of a few thousand people, influential economist Dr Jeffrey Sachs has warned. Speaking to the Guardian, Sachs backed calls for taxation aimed at the largest tech companies, arguing that new technologies were dramatically shifting the income distribution worldwide "from labour to intellectual property (IP) and other capital income." "So rather than cutting capital income taxation, as we've been doing in a race to the bottom, we ought to be finding ways to tax capital income and IP income," Sachs added. "Things like the proposed tech tax are actually a very good idea. The specific form of it is debatable, but the idea is that five companies are worth $3.5tn, basically because of network externalities and information monopolies, and therefore are absolutely right for efficient taxation."

Machine learning is slowly changing the world -- helping cars to "see" the world around them and virtual assistant to understand our questions and commands. Driving forward machine-learning research are companies like Facebook, Google and Baidu -- each of which are identifying new applications for the technology. But how is the field of machine learning changing and what factors are shaping its future direction? Yangqing Jia, director of engineering for Facebook's AI platform team, spoke about the changing nature of the field at the recent AI Conference presented by O'Reilly and Intel AI in London. In supervised learning, the system learns by example, typically by analyzing labelled data, for example, photos annotated to indicate whether they contain a cat.

Deloitte #cogtech survey: 63% say #AI initiatives are needed to catch up with competition. Is your business moving in this direction with #cognitive technologies?

Artificial intelligence is adapting to protect children from the perils of cyber-bullying and social media. Researchers trained a machine-learning algorithm to detect bullying posts on social media and hide them from view. The AI detected words and phrases in this dataset that were typically associated with bullying and filtered out more than two-thirds of threats, insults and instances of sexual harassment. Gilles Jacobs at Ghent University in Belgium built the programme and tasked it with filtering real-life posts from AskFM. A team of professional linguists went through the same set of data and picked out the offensive posts from almost 200,000 posts.

The Amazon Echo cracked a longstanding challenge for tech companies striving for maximum engagement: How do you embed stationary tech access points around the home in a relatively non-disruptive way? The smart speaker resonated because it provided an ambient attention-free alternative to dragging the illuminated slab from your pocket and twiddling with it long enough to get the weather or music you wanted. Not content with leaving the home to purely auditory exchanges though, tech giants are seeking to expand the success of smart speakers into smart displays. These devices use a screen to augment or confirm information relayed through requests as well as act as tablet-sized TVs for smaller rooms, because how can people be expected to carve pumpkins without having Stranger Things playing inches away? More seriously, smart displays certainly seem like a win for providing more of the benefits of smart speakers to the hearing impaired.

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Imagine if we could call out to our living room TV to access a show or movie, get step-by-step cooking directions, watch YouTube clips on demand, have it double as a digital photo frame, look up anything in the world, make phone calls and run your home automation system. How cool would that be? That's the promise of Google's new Home Hub, a $149 talking speaker that is taking on Amazon's $229 Echo Show in what's expected to be one of the biggest marketing battles of the holidays. How small is the Google Home Hub? So tiny that the Amazon Echo dwarfs it, and Mr. Jinx the cat towers over it.

Google brings video to the talking speaker category with the new Google Home Hub. USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham explains why the device has potential. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Google brings video to the talking speaker category with the new Google Home Hub.

The most amazing technological phenomenon of the millennial generation has galloped and overshadowed everything else. From the times of'Turing test' to personal perceptions of tech enthusiasts, the mighty technology has breathtakingly establishes itself to captivate the humans senses and empower the world for the same. Lives of the commoners are reaching an unbelievable level of productivity all impacted by these. Artificial intelligence is like a tool, and it is used for both ill and good intentions. Cars and motorcycles have been invented to help us travel faster all over the country as long as there are roads, but it has also lead to many car accidents on the road.