Over the last few years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been delivering competitive advantage to businesses across a wide spectrum of industries. By Deloitte's most recent count, 37 percent of organizations have deployed AI solutions (up 270 percent from 2016) and a majority predict it will "substantially transform" their companies by 2023. The shift may also mean transforming their workforce. "As AI drives these transformations, it is changing how work gets done in organizations by making operations more efficient, supporting better decision-making, and freeing up workers from certain tasks," Deloitte reports. "The nature of job roles and the skills that are most needed are evolving."

As artificial intelligence becomes integrated into more technology in our homes and workplaces, concerns about its ethical implications are growing. It seems like every day there are new tools designed to help workers use their time more efficiently with machine learning. If these trends continue, what will the workplaces of the future look like? What if it goes wrong? Keiichi Matsuda's new short film Merger taps into that uncertainty by imagining a workplace where humans have been proven to be less capable than AI.

The "Deus Ex" series was not canceled. This is what Eidos Montreal studio head David Anfossi confirmed recently. The project has been put on the back burner as the developer focuses its attention on completing "Shadow of the Tomb Raider." A video interview from last week shows Anfossi being asked about "Deus Ex" and he set the record straight by saying that Eidos Montreal did not forget about the series at all. "It's not dead," he said before adding that they are still thinking about the franchise's future.

A mayoral candidate in Japan has vowed to replace politicians with artificial intelligence that he says will gather statistics on voters to create policies. Michihito Matsuda, outlining his campaign in Tama New Town, western Tokyo, insisted machines would be able to crunch data to form'clearly defined politics'. Photographs show his campaign poster, which features a picture of a metallic humanoid robot with female features, on cars and billboards in the area. Matsuda, 44, made an impassioned speech outlining his unusual political vision for the vast Tama New Town housing development, which was built in the 1960s and is the largest in Japan. He said: 'Tama New Town was the most advanced city in Japan 40 years ago.

"Policies for the future" and a promise to lead the next generation were among the electoral pledges the artificially intelligent candidate, who went by the name Michihito Matsuda, said it would implement. "Artificial intelligence will change Tama City," Matsuda's campaign slogan read and the claim clearly struck a chord with many residents as the robot garnered 4,000 votes in the race. However, Matsuda finished in third place in the election, which was comfortably won by the incumbent Hiroyuki Abe, NHK reports. Matsuda was the face of the campaign but the human brains behind the operation were high powered Japanese businessmen Tetsuzo Matsumoto, the vice president of Softbank, and Norio Murakami, former Google Japan representative, Otaquest reports. Despite these tech-savvy connections a robot identical to Matsuda's is still available for purchase online and the candidate's official website was pretty poorly designed and contained apparent coding errors.

Since Google's computer program AlphaGo won four out of five matches against South Korea's champion Go player, Japanese governmental officials are seriously wondering whether artificial intelligence (AI) is the way to rewrite Japan's blueprint for the future. There is precedent for programs beating humans. IBM's Deep Blue beat chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, and in 2012, computer programs beat professionals of Shogi, also known as Japanese chess. But the Japanese government has never been as shaken as this time. That's because Go, which is played on a grid of 19 horizontal lines and 19 vertical lines, is considered "the last bastion of human intelligence."