On August 1st in 1981, MTV launched, and the face of music changed forever. And again, in the early nineties and noughties when the internet gave rise to iTunes and Amazon. You don't see people carrying portable CD players or waiting in line to buy the latest album release. Algorithms, robots, automation, machine learning (the list goes on) are all technologies impacting our everyday lives and traditional industries, particularly the financial sector. Take credit cards -- only effectively differentiated on two fronts: eligibility and price.

Managing and, preferably, optimizing your full financial portfolio, an investment portfolio, a pension plan and so on is traditionally a human task. It is done by various possible people such as investment managers, wealth managers, financial advisers and even accountants. Since just a few years a range of new fintechs hit the market with so-called robo-advisers or automated financial advice tools. They have been popping up (and keep popping up) in no time and some already even dissapeared. Automated financial advice and optimization is a hot and diverse market with the launch of several platforms, digital and/or mobile in a really short timeframe.

A paralyzed woman has accomplished an amazing feat: finishing a half marathon. With the help of a bionic suit, 36-year-old Claire Lomas was able to finish Sunday the Great North Run in England after just five days. Lomas has been paralyzed from her chest down since 2007 when she was in a horseback riding accident. Lomas was able to manage the feat by using a ReWalk robotic exoskeleton, which uses motion sensors to help her lift and move her legs along the route. The suit has lightweight braces that support the legs and motors that rotate the joints along the way.

While it's a bit premature to start fearing for your job just yet, robots are on the rise in the restaurant sector. The US' influential National Restaurant Association show in Chicago featured three robots this year: a sushi bot that can make 3,600 pieces of nigiri per hour; a vending-machine-style robot that makes bespoke salads and a robotic fry cook. More impressively, over in Japan, Pizza Hut is trialling a robotic waiter called Pepper. If the promotional video is to be believed, the 3ft humanoid is extremely sophisticated, verbally interacting with diners in much the same way as a human being. It can even respond to questions about dietary requirements, giving info on calorie counts and fat content.

Google's parent company, Alphabet, is wasting no time helping to fund intelligent medical treatments. Just a month after it teamed up with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to pioneer so-called bioelectronic medicines capable of treating chronic disease, another of its umbrella companies, Verily Life Sciences (formerly Google Life Sciences), confirmed today that it has teamed up with French pharmaceutical company Sanofi to form a new joint venture that will help treat diabetes. In a joint press release, the two companies said they will call the new 500 million venture Onduo and will focus on enabling people with diabetes to "live full, healthy lives by developing comprehensive solutions that combine devices, software, medicine, and professional care to enable simple and intelligent disease management." Initially, Onduo will work on type 2 diabetes, helping patients make informed decisions about their health, whether that's managing their medication or suggesting ways to improve their overall quality of life. Reuters reports that the products on sale will include connected insulin pens and will also involve the launch of various online services.

Xperilabs is a machine learning, data science and algorithms studio for Indian Financial Markets. We are currently working in stealth mode, rapidly developing the pre-beta version of our platform. Our vision is to build a state-of-the-art platform that offers tools and algorithms that will allow retail as well as institutional investors to explore and design quantitatively driven financial algorithms.

Researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium said a study they conducted showed artificial intelligence could help interpret, and thereby improve, lung function tests used to diagnose long-term lung disease. Results of the study were presented Monday at the European Respiratory Society's International Congress. As part of the study, the researchers used data from 968 people who were undergoing complete lung function testing for the first time. Using a concept called "machine learning", they developed an algorithm that takes into account routine lung function parameters and clinical variables of smoking history, body mass index, and age to make a suggestion for the most likely diagnosis. "We have demonstrated that artificial intelligence can provide us with a more accurate diagnosis in this new study," Wim Janssens, senior author of the study, said.

Steam rolled out of the pot, and my kitchen was filled with an intoxicating blend of scents. I'd cooked a turkey ragu before, but as soon as I opened the pot, I knew this would be an entirely different experience. There were the familiar, comforting notes of ground turkey and mushrooms, but there was also earthiness from the beets, the fire of serrano chile, and an unexpected brightness from the coriander seed (coriander seed!). My dinner wouldn't have been out of place at one of San Francisco's trendy food trucks or upscale restaurants, but coming out of my 15 IKEA pot, it was unbelievable. As I mixed in the pasta and ricotta cheese and took the first incredible bite, I realized that A.I. could do a lot more for me than just beating me at Go.

Fingerprints can be stolen, iris scans spoofed, and facial recognition software fooled. It has become increasingly challenging to unassailably authenticate a person's identity, so academic teams have turned to brain waves as the next step in biometric identification. Many of these efforts seek to outdo one another, boasting how accurately and accessibly they can verify a person's identity using electroencephalograph (EEG) data. In April, for example, a team in New York achieved 100 percent accuracy at identifying individuals using a skullcap with 30 electrodes. Last week, we reported on a simple set of earbud sensors that worked with 80 percent accuracy.

Advances in machine learning and mobile robotics mean that robots could do your job better than you. That's led to some radical predictions of mass unemployment, much more leisure or a work free future. Queen Elizabeth I denied a patent for a knitting machine over fears it would create unemployment, Ricardo thought technology would lower wages and Keynes famously predicted a 15 hour working week by 2030. Understanding why these beliefs proved to be wrong gives us important insights into why similar claims about robotisation might be incorrect. But automation could nevertheless have sizeable distributional implications and ramifications well beyond the industries in which it's deployed.