In August, a thoughtful blogger, Tanner Greer, posed an interesting question to the Silicon Valley crowd: "What are the contents of the'vague tech canon'? If we say it is 40 books, what are they?" He was using the term "canon" in the sense of "the collection of works considered representative of a period or genre", but astutely qualifying it to stop Harold Bloom – the great literary critic who spent his life campaigning for a canon consisting of the great works of the past (Shakespeare, Proust, Dante, Montaigne et al) – spinning in his grave. Greer's challenge was immediately taken up by Patrick Collison, co-founder with his brother, John, of the fintech giant Stripe (market value 65bn) and thus among the richest Irishmen in history. Unusually among tech titans, Collison is a passionate advocate of reading, and so it was perhaps predictable that he would produce a list of 43 books – adding a caveat that it wasn't "the list of books that I think one ought to read – it's just the list that I think roughly covers the major ideas that are influential here".

Facial recognition technology has progressed to point where it now interprets emotions in facial expressions. This type of analysis is increasingly used in daily life. For example, companies can use facial recognition software to help with hiring decisions. Other programs scan the faces in crowds to identify threats to public safety. Unfortunately, this technology struggles to interpret the emotions of black faces.

Facial recognition technology has progressed to point where it now interprets emotions in facial expressions. This type of analysis is increasingly used in daily life. For example, companies can use facial recognition software to help with hiring decisions. Other programs scan the faces in crowds to identify threats to public safety. Unfortunately, this technology struggles to interpret the emotions of black faces.

The machines are coming for us--or at least for our jobs. From a bot that'll whip you up the perfect cheeseburger, to a flurry of cameras and scanners designed to make checkout lines a thing of the past, automation is already chipping away at middle-skill jobs in multiple industries. So is it time to abandon your job in panic and run to the hills? Stacy Brown-Philpot doesn't think so. "There's always this question of what are robots going to replace," Brown-Philpot, CEO of TaskRabbit, told WIRED editor in chief Nicholas Thompson at the WIRED25 Festival in San Francisco.

Citi Ventures has made an investment in the artificial intelligence software company Anaconda, which its parent company Citigroup knows very well. It turns out Citigroup has been using this popular open source software across its entire enterprise for a couple of years. Large banks like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, BBVA and Ally Bank are among the many with AI deployments. David B. Weiss, principal of the consulting firm Market Structure Metrics, said he has observed "an ever-growing, five-year trend of banks tactically trialing and deploying AI and related technologies like machine learning and robotic process automation to target multiple processes in various parts of their businesses." Jesse McWaters, financial innovation lead at the World Economic Forum, has also been seeing "a significant increase in investment in AI specialist companies" among banks.

Stripe, the startup that lets websites and mobile apps implement payment services through its API and a few lines of code, is today adding in another new feature as it continues to build out its platform with more tools. It is now going to help prevent fraud on Stripe transactions, through a new service called Radar. Radar is being rolled out globally as part of Stripe's primary payments service, meaning companies that use Stripe's API for payments do not need to pay extra or do anything in particular to turn it on. That may change down the line if and when Stripe -- which has now raised around $300 million and is valued at around $5 billion -- begins to add in more features and decides to monetise the service separately. "This is an area of active development and there is a long list of things we want to do," said John Collison, Stripe's co-founder and president, in an interview. "We haven't ruled out [launching it as a separate service] but want to see how people use it and what works and what doesn't first."

The Collison brothers' 5bn payments powerhouse Stripe is making its move into machine learning in a bid to wipe out card fraud, which is expected to total 183bn by 2020. Credit and debit card fraud has only accelerated as the internet has grown. Employing machine-learning tools, Stripe's new Radar technology is powered by the company's own behaviour network. This is a machine-learning system that learns from and adapts its defences based on transactions across hundreds of thousands of businesses, using the Stripe's technology globally. 'With Stripe Radar, businesses essentially have caller ID for incoming charges' – JOHN COLLISON According to Stripe, this is the first and only machine-learning-based fraud tool that requires no set-up and works for every user from the moment of their first transaction.