Artificial intelligence-enabled armies are being designed and planned -- right now. "We are not organized to win this competition. We just are not," he says. "We have got to take this competition seriously, and we need to win it." The Pentagon promises to build an "ethical" AI army.

For the second year in a row, We Are Social had the privilege of presenting at Vivid Sydney this year. Already one of the world's leading festivals, Vivid is a bit like SXSW: an amalgam of inspiring people, creative work, and fresh ideas across a variety of themes and topics. For our 2017 keynote, I joined forces with We Are Social's Sydney MD, Suzie Shaw, to explore the impact that algorithms and machine learning are having on every aspect of our lives, and what that means for marketing. You'll find our complete presentation in the SlideShare embed above (click here if that's not working for you), but we thought it might help to dig a bit deeper into our narrative too. More than half of the world's population now uses the internet, and we're increasingly taking that connectivity with us wherever we go thanks to our smartphones.

In a report commissioned by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board, top defense and technical professionals argue that the United States needs to prepare for artificial intelligence in warfare – because other countries might prepare for it first. "While evident that the DoD is moving forward in the employment of autonomous functionality, it is equally evident that the pull from diverse global markets is accelerating the underlying tech base and delivering high-value capabilities at a much more rapid pace," the introduction to the 121-page report reads. Along with this comes a caveat that the study isn't recommending major projects, "given the current budget environment." Instead, it suggested a wide variety of experimental projects, plus recommending that the DoD reach out to private "non-traditional R&D communities." The report operated under the idea that autonomous weapons capabilities were going to be developed eventually, and that the United States needs to avoid an AI Cold War.