At Wander cafe in Auckland's Wynyard Quarter, someone at the next table is listening to Sean Gourley while he is being interviewed about artificial intelligence. After eavesdropping on the chat they get up, walk over to Gourley's table and tell him how scared they are. Gourley says most people think there is a 1% chance of war between China and the United States, but in his universe it is looking more like 50%. US defence and intelligence clients account for a large portion of the business Gourley's San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI) company, PrimerAI, does – and right now business is booming. READ MORE: * Keeping up with the machines, new supercomputer will be NZ's most powerful for AI * Kiwis need to think about what they want from the age of AI, report says * 'Google should not be in the business of war', says employee after it drops Pentagon AI contract * While artificial intelligence is tipped to be'as significant as electricity', it's not coming for your job, yet ...

Israel has sought to increase its operational success on the battlefield through a major push for digitization in the Israel Defense Forces. The importance of this transformation was apparent in the recent conflict in Gaza that Israeli officials have called the first "artificial intelligence war." Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi has made employing digital potential a central feature of his command, according to Col. Eli Birenbaum, head of the IDF Digital Transformation Division's Architecture Department. "The IDF had a few shortcomings to increase our lethality on the battlefield," said Birenbaum in an interview. While the IDF looks like one organization from the outside, for years its different services, including the air force, navy and ground forces, were balkanized in their use of their own networks for data services, he said.

Israeli writer Yuval Harari claims that the world is in the middle of an artificial intelligence war led by the USA and China. According to Harari, countries that cannot keep up with the race will either go bankrupt or become colonial. Israeli historian Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Textbooks for the 21st Century, claims that the world is now in the midst of a US and China-led artificial intelligence war. Hariri said, "If you have enough data, you do not need to send troops to a country to take over it. Countries that fail to keep up with this race will either go bankrupt or become a colonial data colony.

Chinese artificial intelligence is now capable of outperforming humans in reading comprehension. A neural network model created by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba beat its flesh-and-blood competition on a 100,000-question Stanford University test that's considered the world's top measure of machine reading. The model, developed by Alibaba's Institute of Data Science of Technologies, scored 82.44, while humans scored a 82.304. Microsoft's artificial intelligence also beat humans, scoring 82.65 on the exam. But its results came in a day after Alibaba's, meaning China holds the title as first country to create automation that outranks humans in written language comprehension.

If you're an Executive Assistant, I'd say you've got 2 good years left to do your job in the same manner you've always done it. For those of you who think that Executive Assistants are so "specialized" and "unique" that they could never be replaced, please allow me to lovingly slap you across the face. Our role has historically been one that does the most, but garners the least amount of respect within the organization. Shit, we still have issues walking into our Exec's office and demanding pay commensurate with the work that we actually do and all of the miracles we perform on a daily basis! We can't even advocate for ourselves 90% of the time, yet we feel we're somehow indispensable "because soft skills."

Today, the question of artificial intelligence (AI) and its role in future warfare is becoming far more salient and dramatic than ever before. Rapid progress in driverless cars in the civilian economy has helped us all see what may become possible in the realm of conflict. All of a sudden, it seems, terminators are no longer the stuff of exotic and entertaining science-fiction movies, but a real possibility in the minds of some. Innovator Elon Musk warns that we need to start thinking about how to regulate AI before it destroys most human jobs and raises the risk of war. It is good that we start to think this way.

A Robocop army taking over major military missions around the world is still far from being a reality, but that does not mean that the world's military powers are not working hard to make that scenario into reality as soon as they can. If you think that remotely controlled or semi-autonomous vehicles are too much to take, wait and see what the future of AI and IoT will deliver to those who seek to fight the battles of the future with "thinking machines". A recently published study, produced for the United States Department of Defence, explains that "there are both substantial operational benefits and potential perils associated with the use of autonomy." In a nutshell, AI gives the military an upper hand over its enemies, as long as those enemies do not have the same or more advanced technological capabilities, of course. On paper, having an AI military force provides advantages such as a reduction in the number of humans who may be in harms way – tell that to the unknown victims of US drone operations -, increased speed in the completion of those missions, and undoubtedly, autonomy.