Steve Rose goes for a spin. Steve Rose goes for a spin. 'We don't tell the car what it should do': my ride in a self-driving taxi Driverless'robotaxis' will be accepting fares in Britain's biggest city by the end of next year. Can they deal with London's medieval roads, hordes of pedestrians and errant ebikers? 'I'm really excited to show you this," says Alex Kendall, the CEO of Wayve, as he gets behind the wheel of one of the company's electric Ford Mustangs. The car pulls up to a junction at a busy road in King's Cross, London, all by itself. "You can see that it's going to control the speed, steering, brake, indicators," he says to me - I'm in the passenger seat. "It's making decisions as it goes.

Happy Monster Hunter Wilds week to all who celebrate: Capcom's thrilling action game has sold 8m units in three days, which means that quite a lot of you are likely to be playing it. I'm a huge fan of this series and am delighted by the latest entry, but after filing the review last week, I've barely had a minute to play it since it came out. Regular readers will know that this is a familiar problem for me: I have two kids, so my gaming time is tight, and the living room TV is very often in use. I anticipated this, so in the run-up to Monster Hunter Wilds' release, I spent 200 on a PlayStation Portal – essentially a screen sandwiched between two halves of a PlayStation 5 controller. I can't decide whether it's one of the most unwieldy things that Sony has ever come out with, or one of the most elegant.

Check out the on-demand sessions from the Low-Code/No-Code Summit to learn how to successfully innovate and achieve efficiency by upskilling and scaling citizen developers. Artificial intelligence (AI) may be eating the world as we know it, but experts say AI itself is also starving -- and needs to change its diet. One company says synthetic data is the answer. "Data is food for AI, but AI today is underfed and malnourished," said Kevin McNamara, CEO and cofounder of synthetic data platform provider, Parallel Domain, which just raised $30 million in a series B round. "That's why things are growing slowly. But if we can feed that AI better, models will grow faster and in a healthier way. Synthetic data is like nourishment for training AI." Research has shown that about 90% of AI and machine learning (ML) deployments fail.

LONDON (Reuters) - When banks were flooded with loan requests from businesses struggling with the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, hastily built robots helped several lenders cope with the deluge. The bots were one of many quick technology changes deployed across the industry during the crisis, a contrast to the slow progress it's made in the past two decades to improve technology in the face of increasing competition from fintech rivals. Now the jolt from the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the process even though banks globally are having to cut IT spending this year for the first time since 2009, based on data from research company IDC. "Bots allowed us to process a much higher volume of applications than we would have been able to do before. It meant the timelines didn't get longer with the massive volume," said Simon McNamara, chief administrative officer at Britain's NatWest, which has granted more than 13 billion pounds ($16.90 billion) of state-backed loans.

Ms. Beer was among 30 IT executives who responded via email to CIO Journal's annual end-of-year questionnaire reflecting on 2019 and looking ahead to 2020. "I believe that without making it your top priority, you're going to struggle to deliver any of your other priorities," she said. The Sydney-based software company in 2019 formed a cross-functional team designed to explore ways to improve collaboration within the IT group. Cigna Corp. CIO Mark Boxer called talent a perennial priority. "It's our number-one differentiator and we will continue to retain, develop and attract the best talent heading into 2020," he said.

Anyone looking for an industry to illustrate the implications of digital disruption need look no further than financial services. High-street branches continue to close at an alarming rate as many services go online, while the traditional banks face stiff competition from online rivals who don't have to worry about bricks-and-mortar at all – plus a horde of fintech startups touting new options like cryptocurrencies and more. Such is the potential for change that Gartner estimates as many as 80% of traditional banks will go out of business by 2030. The analyst says established financial services providers will have to move faster by building digital platforms or finding niche products. SEE: Digital transformation: A CXO's guide (ZDNet special report) Download the report as a PDF (TechRepublic) Royal Bank of Scotland Group is one financial services giant that claims to be taking a proactive approach, rather than the reactive response to IT and business change that tends to characterise big-name banks.

NAB has found "hundreds" of use cases across the bank for machine learning and analytics technology and is in the process of standing them up. Speaking at the AWS summit in Singapore last month, executive general manager of the bank's program management office, Kyle McNamara, provided extra detail on initiatives also spoken about at the AWS Sydney summit. In Sydney, NAB revealed it is standing up an AWS-backed elastic data lake called discovery cloud, which will act as the foundation for its machine learning and analytics push. In Singapore, however, NAB revealed the initial scope of its analytics efforts. "At NAB there are literally hundreds of use cases in marketing, risk, operations and compliance that can and are starting to leverage analytics and machine learning," McNamara said.

Self-driving vehicles will "inevitably" reach Ireland within years, the man behind a global tech conference has said. Philip McNamara said that the technology was 40 times safer than manual driving and it was only a matter of time before people backed the industry. The MobilityX conference in Dublin tomorrow will focus on self-driving cars. "I live in San Francisco and there's hundreds of self-driving cars that are on the streets every day," Mr McNamara, originally from Galway, said. "I think it's inevitable that they will be over here in a few years' time.

Artificially intelligent nano-machines will be injected into humans within 20 years to repair and enhance muscles, cells and bone, a senior inventor at IBM has forecast. John McNamara, who works at IBM Hursley Innovation Centre, in Hampshire, submitted evidence to the House of Lords Artificial Intelligence Committee. Mr McNamara said that within just two decades, technology may have advanced so much that humans and machines are effectively'melded' together, allowing for huge leaps forward in human consciousness and cognition. "We may see AI nano-machines being injected into our bodies," he told Peers. "These will provide huge medical benefits, such as being able to repair damage to cells, muscles and bones – perhaps even augment them.

London: Artificially intelligent (AI) nano-machines will be injected into humans in 20 years to be used to repair and enhance muscles, cells and bones, as well as enable us to control our environment with thought and gestures, says an IT specialist at IBM. "We may see nano-machines being injected into our bodies," John McNamara, senior inventor and IT specialist at IBM's Hursley Innovation Centre in Hampshire, UK, was quoted as saying to the Telegraph.co.uk. "These will provide huge medical benefits, such as being able to repair damage to cells, muscles and bones -- perhaps even augment them," McNamara added. McNamara said that within two decades, technology may have advanced to such a level that humans and machines are effectively "melded" together, allowing for huge leaps forward in human consciousness and cognition, raising the economic, ethical and social implications of AI. "Beyond this, utilising technology which is already being explored today, we see the creation of technology that can meld the biological with the technological and so be able to enhance human cognitive capability directly, as well as being able to utilise vast quantities of computing power to augment our own thought processes. "Using this technology, embedded in ourselves and in our surroundings, we will begin to be able to control our environment with thought and gestures alone," McNamara noted. However, in a report submitted to the House of Lords Artificial Intelligence Committee, McNamara warned that the rise of AI could bring "huge disruption" in the retail and service sectors which could spike widespread unemployment.