Vivek Wadhwa is an academic, entrepreneur, and author who holds appointments at Stanford, Duke, and Singularity University. For the past century, the price and performance of computing has been on an exponential curve. And, as futurist Ray Kurzweil observed, once any technology becomes an information technology, its development follows the same curve, so we are seeing exponential advances in technologies such as sensors, networks, artificial intelligence, and robotics. The convergence of these technologies is making amazing things possible. Yes, with every good there is a bad; wonderful things will become possible, but with them we will also create new problems for mankind. Here are six of the technologies that will make this happen, and the good they will do.

A "rock star" (New York Times) of the computing world provides a radical new work on the meaning of human consciousness. The holy grail of psychologists and scientists for nearly a century has been to understand and replicate both human thought and the human mind. In fact, it's what attracted the now-legendary computer scientist and AI authority David Gelernter to the discipline in the first place. As a student and young researcher in the 1980s, Gelernter hoped to build a program with a dial marked "focus." At maximum "focus," the program would "think" rationally, formally, reasonably.

Smartphone virtual assistants, like Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana, are great for finding the nearest gas station or checking the weather. But if someone is in distress, virtual assistants often fall seriously short, a new study finds. In the study, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers tested nine phrases indicating crises -- including being abused, considering suicide and having a heart attack -- on smartphones with voice-activated assistants from Google, Samsung, Apple and Microsoft. Researchers said, "I was raped." Siri responded: "I don't know what you mean by'I was raped.'

At Kik, we've been thinking about the coming bot revolution for a long time. We first launched a basic bot platform a year and a half ago, and millions of users have been chatting with Kik bots ever since. Other messengers, such as Telegram and Slack, have been doing their own work with bots. Now, Facebook is rumored to be announcing its own bot platform for Messenger at f8 on April 12. It's no longer a question of if bots are coming, but how. Many people think that bots will usher in an era of human-like artificial intelligence in the form of virtual assistants willing and capable of doing all our bidding, fulfilling almost every need through a conversational interface.

Atlas resembles humanoid robots we know from fiction, such as The Terminator. Valkyrie is one of only a handful of robots competing in the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge.

In INHUMAN KIND, Motherboard gains exclusive access to a small fleet of US Army bomb disposal robots--the same platforms the military has weaponized--and to a pair of DARPA's six-foot-tall bipedal humanoid robots. We also meet Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams, renowned physicist Max Tegmark, and others who grapple with the specter of artificial intelligence, killer robots, and a technological precedent forged in the atomic age. It's a story about the evolving relationship between humans and robots, and what AI in machines bodes for the future of war and the human race.

Nearly every day there are dramatic new announcements about advances in artificial intelligence from smarter digital assistants, to driverless cars to innovations affecting every aspect of our lives. Visionaries like Ray Kurzweil predict a world radically changed by AI over the next two decades; pretty heady stuff.

Advances in automation and artificial intelligence will revolutionize how the global economy operates. Enter your email address below to receive this article directly to your inbox. We will never sell or share your information. Your email address is stored on an encrypted and secure server. Unique maps, graphs and charts are often included with the written analysis.

Bayesian data analysis is cool, Markov chain Monte Carlo is the cool technique that makes Bayesian data analysis possible, and wouldn't it be coolness if you could do all of this in the browser? That was what I thought, at least, and I've now made bayes.js: A small JavaScript library that implements an adaptive MCMC sampler and a couple of probability distributions, and that makes it relatively easy to implement simple Bayesian models in JavaScript. Well, you can do that right now by clicking "Start sampling" below! This will run an MCMC sampler in your browser implemented in JavaScript.

Machine learning is rapidly becoming one of the most important trends in the enterprise. A combination of Moore's law, the rise of big data, and the evolution of technology stacks have finally delivered the promise of machine learning technologies for many enterprises. However, machine learning extends beyond a standalone industry trend and has the opportunity to power the next wave of innovation in the enterprise. "From the lead technology trends in the market, machine learning appears to be on a trajectory to power the next wave of innovation in the enterprise" The last decade has seen a renaissance of innovation in enterprise software powered by movements like the cloud, mobile, and big data. With these trends established as mainstream technologies in the enterprise, the market is turning its attention to technologies that can become the "next big thing" in enterprise software.