Currently the world is rapidly developing robotic and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. These technologies offer enormous potential benefits, yet there are also drawbacks and dangers. Using the Ethics Center's Framework for Ethical Decision Making, we can consider some of the ethical issues involved with Robots and AI. Utilitarianism is a form of moral reasoning which emphasizes the consequences of actions. Typically it tries to maximize happiness and minimize suffering, though there are other ways to use utilitarian evaluation such as cost-benefit analysis.

Siri had a good run, but its time in the spotlight is over. Alexa has arrived, and it's way smarter than Siri. Alexa, of course, is the voice-activated "smart" assistant lurking inside the Amazon Echo, Amazon Echo Dot and Amazon Tap products. If you own one of these gadgets, you probably know the basics by now--you can ask Alexa for today's weather forecast, a daily news briefing, an oven timer or a favorite playlist. But as the Echo family of products has grown, so has the ecosystem that surrounds it.

We are all witnesses that 2016 was the year when Digital Health technologies took off and developed actively. Such rapid growth was partly due to the emergence of numerous wearable tech devices, but also due to numerous breakthroughs in other IT-related business areas. Digital health improves the quality of life, increases the lifespan, and gives people an opportunity to learn more about their lifestyles and how their bodies work. Most importantly, digital health (or, more specifically, digital healthcare) changes and improves the quality of care for patients, by enhancing the instruments for surgeons and other medical staff. Let's find out what are the main trends in health information technologies (HIT) and how will they affect the development of the sphere as a whole.

Otsimo provides free games for autistic children to help improve attention spans using machine learning and gamification. Autistic spectrum disorders, or ASDs, impose huge costs, both human and economic, on sufferers, their families, and the community. The human toll, in terms of care and impaired relationships, is almost impossible to quantify. Looking at the US alone, the economic expenditure last year was estimated at about $268bn. The exact causes of the pathology are still unknown, and there is no medical solution except for early and intensive education, which can at least reduce the symptoms.

At some point in the course of pregnancy, a woman is likely to suspect that the baby she is incubating has somehow hijacked her brain. New research suggests that, in some sense, she's right, and that pregnancy itself is altering her brain like no other experience she's had since adolescence. The places where a pregnant woman's brain shrinks are very specific, the research says. The structural renovations wrought by pregnancy appear to overlap almost perfectly with the brain regions that play a key role in how we understand and interpret the actions, intentions and feelings of others. And the brain of a first-time mother stays changed -- for at least two years after she has given birth, according to the new research, published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Pregnant women did not lose intellectual ground, the researchers found: as a group, their working memory and memory for words was no better or worse than before pregnancy.

PARIS – Pregnancy causes "long-lasting" physical changes to a woman's brain, with significant, but seemingly beneficial, gray matter loss in parts of the crucial organ, a study said Monday. Some alterations lasted at least two years, they reported, but did not appear to erode memory or other mental processes. The changes "concern brain areas associated with functions necessary to manage the challenges of motherhood," study co-author Erika Barba-Muller of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) said in a statement. The radical hormone surges and physical changes of pregnancy have long been known and studied, but its effects on the brain have been little understood. The new study, published in Nature Neuroscience, claims to provide the first evidence "that pregnancy confers long-lasting changes in a woman's brain."

The TechCrunch conference is an event that swoops in on the startup scenes of the US and Europe, gathering for appraisal the technology world's rising movers, shakers and innovators. It's widely regarded as the place to get a feel for what's happening at the industry's grassroots – which is exactly what PwC Innovation Manager Marina Paronetto headed to London to do. As it turns out, it was the brains behind the machine – artificial intelligence – that was the star of 2016's show. It was said in sarcasm, but MC Jordan Crook couldn't have been more accurate when she said that TechCrunch's theme for its latest Disrupt conference was artificial intelligence. From what I saw, every solution on show here featured an element of AI.

Whether by accident or design, the details of Google's plans for artificial intelligence (AI) have been elusive. In some cases, there's no real mystery, just nothing all that exciting to talk about. AI technology is the foundation of the company's search engine, and the most obvious reason for Google's high-profile, $400M acquisition of DeepMind in 2014 is to use the UK firm's expertise in deep learning--a subset of AI research, but more on that later--to bolster that core capability. But the Googleplex has absorbed other bright minds from the field of AI, as well as some of the most buzzed-about companies in robotics, with only some of that collective braintrust officially allocated to driverless cars, delivery drones or other publicly announced robotics or AI-related projects. What, exactly, are Google's AI experts up to?

Survival: "Our entire existence is based on having the best detection mechanism possible," says Valerie Bannert-Thurner at Nasdaq. Certain things make Valerie Bannert-Thurner raise an eyebrow when looking for signs of bad behavior on the Nasdaq exchange. "I like the example of excessive cheering because the guys just can't help themselves but cheer," said Bannert-Thurner, who is senior vice president and head of risk and surveillance at Nasdaq. Another worrisome indicator is seemingly too-good-to-be-true trading profits. "If people are excessively profitable given how they trade and in comparison to everybody else trading the same instruments with similar styles, then we ask, is this luck or something else?" Bannert-Thurner said.

As we look to a New Year, it is hard to say what 2017 has in store thanks to the level of uncertainty that 2016 leaves in its wake. One thing for certain, however, is that 2017 is set to be an eventful and thrilling ride for FinTech with many factors and potential obstacles on the horizon which still challenge the sector. In today's society people are effectively running their whole lives from their mobiles: reading the news, online banking, heating their home and maintaining relationships. Payments are a part of that so it is expected that the numbers to climb further next year. Smartphone sales are reaching saturation point in developed markets, and the growth of technology adoption today are now firmly fixated on emerging and developing nations.