At an adult industry conference in Prague last month, delegates noted a sharp increase in sites offering users the chance to form AI relationships. At an adult industry conference in Prague last month, delegates noted a sharp increase in sites offering users the chance to form AI relationships. 'Obedient, yielding and happy to follow': the troubling rise of AI girlfriends E leanor, 24, is a Polish historian and lecturer at a university in Warsaw; Isabelle, 25, is a detective serving with the NYPD; Brooke, 39, is an American housewife who enjoys an opulent Miami lifestyle financed by her frequently absent husband. All three women will flirt and chat and send nude photographs and explicit videos via one of a soaring number of new adult dating websites that offer an increasingly realistic selection of AI girlfriends for subscribers willing to pay a monthly fee. At the TES adult industry conference in Prague last month, delegates noted a sharp increase in new websites offering users the chance to form relationships with AI-generated girlfriends, who will remove their clothes in exchange for tokens purchased by bank transfer.

Police seized ketamine hidden inside life-size Transformer robots in Thailand. A woman who was previously caught trying to ship meth hidden in a food processing machine was trying to send the robots to Taiwan. Thai police have broken up a large network that illegally helped foreigners, mostly Russians, to stay in Thailand long-term through the use of company nominees or shell companies, officials said Friday. Police said a 45-year-old Russian woman who came to Thailand in 2012 operated the scheme with a Thai woman who was listed as an executive or a shareholder of more than 270 companies in the southern province of Phuket. Foreigners can operate a business in Thailand, but it must be a joint venture with a Thai partner except in specified cases, and they cannot own more than 49% to protect local competitiveness.

A new study co-authored by an MIT economist shows that improved translation software can significantly boost international trade online -- a notable case of machine learning having a clear impact on economic activity. The research finds that after eBay improved its automatic translation program in 2014, commerce shot up by 10.9 percent among pairs of countries where people could use the new system. To have it be so clear in such a short amount of time really says a lot about the power of this technology," says Erik Brynjolfsson, an MIT economist and co-author of a new paper detailing the results. To put the results in perspective, he adds, consider that physical distance is, by itself, also a significant barrier to global commerce. The 10.9 percent change generated by eBay's new translation software increases trade by the same amount as "making the world 26 percent smaller, in terms of its impact on the goods that we studied," he says. The paper, "Does Machine Translation Affect International Trade?

How the biggest disruption next year will come from women, not robots. Every year, we make predictions in tech about what we will see more of the following year. Whether it is the increase of virtual reality, chatbots, robots or (can it still possibly be) mobile. One thing is for sure. There aren't many banking on the fact it will be women.