At the Goodwood festival of speed near Chichester, the crowds gathered at the hill-climb circuit to watch the world's fastest cars roar past, as they do every year. But not far from the high-octane action, there was a new, and quieter, attraction: a display of the latest electric vehicles, from the £28,000 Mini Electric to the £2m Lotus Evija hypercar. Even here, at one of the biggest events in Britain's petrolhead calendar, it's clear the days of the internal combustion engine are numbered. As countries strive to meet stringent carbon-emission targets, and vehicle-makers phase out combustion engines, 145m electric vehicles are predicted to be on the roads within a decade, up from 11m last year. The car batteries they require, along with storage batteries for solar and wind power, have sent demand for metals soaring, taking mining firms to the bottom of the sea in the hunt for those metals.

The ubiquity of mobile computing -- and rise of algorithms that determine what we watch, hear and experience -- is raising frequent, and perhaps well-founded, concerns about the disintermediation of humans from decision making. Chat bots respond to our most obscure queries in nanoseconds. Algorithms help us pick the perfect restaurant, partner or job candidate. Artificial intelligence, in particular, conjures fears of a dystopian future where Elon Musk's "demons" come for more than just our jobs. And on college campuses, worthy questions are being asked about the incongruity between higher education's mission and the rise of analytics that sort and filter students or faculty in ways that undermine higher education's promise -- and mission.

We live in a world where productivity, a key pillar of long-term economic growth, has crumbled. In the United States, Europe, and other advanced economies, productivity growth has slowed so drastically in the past decade that economists debate whether we have entered a new era of stagnation--and this at a time when we need productivity growth more than ever to sustain growth, as working populations in countries from Germany to Japan age and shrink. Now comes potential help, in the form of advanced robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, which can already outperform humans in a range of activities, from lip-reading to analyzing X-rays. The performance benefits for companies are compelling and not just (or even mainly) in terms of reducing labor costs: automation can also bring whole new business models, and improvements that go beyond human capabilities, such as increasing throughput and quality and raising the speed of responses in a variety of industries. Automation will give the global economy that much-needed productivity boost, even as it enables us to tackle societal "moonshots" such as curing disease or contributing solutions to the climate change challenge.

Facebook wants you to use your brain to interact with your computer. Specifically, instead of using something primitive like a screen or a controller, the company is looking into ways that you and I can interact with our PCs or phones just by using our mind. Regina Dugan, the head of Building 8, the company's secretive hardware R&D division, delved into this on stage at F8. "What if you could type directly from your brain?" she asks. In a video demo, Dugan showed the example of a woman in a Stanford lab who is able to type eight words per minute directly with her brain. This means, Dugan says, that you can text your friends without using your phone.

Apple CEO Tim Cook says you won't have to give up your privacy to have a great AI assistant TIM COOK: Here's why assistants on phones are better than home speakers like the Echo Machine Learning Veterans Launch'Element AI' - A Montreal Based Artificial Intelligence Startup ... Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.