During the holiday season, warehouses across the country used different kinds of robots to fill retail orders and they made--and continue to make--warehouses more efficient than ever before. In fact, if robots were more broadly implemented it's estimated retailers could reduce their fulfillment costs by 450 million to 900 million in North America, according to research from Janney Capital Markets. Today there is a growing group of startup companies developing robots for use in manufacturing, e-commerce and logistics operations. A decade ago, robots working in a warehouse -- or, for that matter, writing newspaper stories, caring for the elderly or providing comfort to hospitalized children -- was the stuff of science fiction. But today, the world is on the cusp of a rapid economic transformation via robotics and artificial intelligence.

The capabilities of Google's artificial intelligence are staggering. The phantoms within Google Photos can organize your pictures, the wizards inside Google Docs let you type and edit using spoken commands, and the brilliant pixies powering AlphaGo can easily beat a master of a 2,500-year-old game more complex than chess. Google's new Smart Reply feature uses artificial neural networks to come up with appropriate responses to email messages. Whether you're using Google's sleek email manager in the browser or via mobile app, Inbox can now answer your emails for you. The machine replies aren't sent automatically, which is good.

This is just one exercise that we could do to imagine a future in which we are irrelevant bystanders. A world in which we kneel at the outer wall of a kingdom we're locked out of. This would be the world in which artificial superintelligence, or ASI, has emerged. ASI is an intellect that exceeds all the smartest, most capable human beings in every field, in abstract reasoning and social manoeuvring and creative experimentation, by unfathomable degrees. This intelligence could take form as a seed AI, a few cognitive steps above a person, or it can be a mature superintelligence that soars miles above, beyond, the blip, the dot of us, collected.

Ride-hailing service Uber has sounded out car companies about placing a large order for self-driving cars, an auto industry source has said. "They wanted autonomous cars," the source, who declined to be named, said. "It seemed like they were shopping around." Loss-making Uber would make drastic savings on its biggest cost -- drivers -- if it were able to incorporate self-driving cars into its fleet. Volkswagen's Audi, Daimler's Mercedes-Benz, BMW and car industry suppliers Bosch and Continental are all working on technologies for autonomous or semi-autonomous cars.

Shedding drivers would save Uber a lot of money. Ride-hailing service Uber has sounded out car companies about placing a large order for self-driving cars, an auto industry source has said. "They wanted autonomous cars," the source, who declined to be named, said. "It seemed like they were shopping around." Loss-making Uber would make drastic savings on its biggest cost -- drivers -- if it were able to incorporate self-driving cars into its fleet.

When we imagine a future where humans and robots coexist, it doesn't take long for us to arrive at a conclusion where the human race tragically ends. A robot takeover usually occurs, followed by the inevitable enslavement of all humankind. But when it comes to the future and what will actually unfold, Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus VR (which Facebook now owns) and inventor of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, isn't sweating it. "The reason I'm not creeped out is pretty simple," said Luckey, who sat down with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Re/code journalist Kara Swisher on Saturday at the Silicon Valley Comic Con in San Jose, California. "A lot of people look to science-fiction for representations of technology.

Small and medium sized businesses are being targeted by IBM and MasterCard as they look to bring big data analytics insights to better understand their markets and consumers. A partnership has been formed by the two companies that sees MasterCard integrate IBM Watson Analytics into its platform, along with its own anonymised transaction data that is gathered through the payment company's Local Market Intelligence. This combination will bring artificial intelligence to its payments platform. The aim is to be able to offer SMBs insights on revenue, market share, customer demographics and competitors in a particular location and across multiple locations. The problem being tackled is that smaller merchants often don't have the resources to maximise data insights.

The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, a Cognitive Computing Competition, was announced on the TED Stage on Feb 17, 2016. It is a 5 million competition challenging teams from around the world to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful cognitive technologies to tackle some of the world's grand challenges. Every year leading up to TED2020, teams will go head-to-head at World of Watson, IBM's annual conference, competing for interim prizes and the opportunity to advance to the next year's competition. The three finalist teams will take the TED stage in 2020 to deliver jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring TED Talks demonstrating what they have achieved. Ideas will be evaluated by a panel of expert judges for technical validity and ultimately, the TED and XPRIZE communities will choose the winner based on the audacity of their mission and the awe-inspiring nature of the teams' TED Talks in 2020.

"Soon, our habitat will be invaded by unreal humans. Not only they'll influence our way of living, but also intervene in our modus operandi." I'm not the only one who thinks this way. Last week I released a list of must watch movies on Machine Learning and Data Science. I've watched 8 of them till now.

Machine learning has taken a significant role in many data initiatives today. Facebook, for instance, is using machine learning to offer personalized ads, whilst Google uses it to learn about its users, and other technology companies are now able to crunch data in a fraction of the time. Organizations have been looking at machine learning as something that has the most use in looking at optimizing its current markets, but this may not be the case for too much longer. Several companies are now using machine learning combined with predictive analytics to help expand into new markets and exploit opportunities as soon as they come up. We heard about this from Wolf Rendall, Data Scientist at Auction.com, at last year's Social Media & Web Analytics Innovation Summit.