The supplier for Apple and Samsung is leading a new push for automated manufacturing. According to reports, the world's largest electronics manufacturer Foxconn has replaced around 60,000 human factory workers with machines. Or, as a government publicist for the city of Kunshan told the South China Morning Post, the factory "reduced employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000 thanks to the introduction of robots. It has tasted success in reduction of labour costs." Although Foxconn confirmed to the BBC that it was working to automate much of its manufacturing operations, the company denied that the new robotic assembly line would mean fewer jobs for humans. Instead, the company says it is simply using the machines to "replace repetitive tasks previously done by employees" while allowing those employees to focus on more valuable parts of the manufacturing process like R&D and quality control.

A century ago, more than 60,000 tigers roamed the wild. Today, the worldwide estimate has dwindled to around 3,200. Poaching is one of the main drivers of this precipitous drop. Whether killed for skins, medicine or trophy hunting, humans have pushed tigers to near-extinction. The same applies to other large animal species like elephants and rhinoceros that play unique and crucial roles in the ecosystems where they live.

Cyber security is a major challenge in today's world, as government agencies, corporations and individuals have increasingly become victims of cyber attacks that are so rapidly finding new ways to threaten the Internet that it's hard for good guys to keep up with them. A group of researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are working with machine-learning startup PatternEx to develop a line of defense against such cyber threats.The team has already developed an Artificial Intelligence system that can detect 85 percent of attacks by reviewing data from more than 3.6 Billion lines of log files each day and informs anything suspicious. The new system does not just rely on the artificial intelligence (AI), but also on human input, which researchers call Analyst Intuition (AI), which is why it has been given the name of Artificial Intelligence Squared or AI2. The system first scans the content with unsupervised machine-learning techniques and then, at the end of the day, presents its findings to human analysts. The human analyst then identifies which events are actual cyber attacks and which aren't. This feedback is then incorporated into the machine learning system of AI2 and is used the next day for analyzing new logs.

Artificial intelligence has had its share of ups and downs recently. In what was widely seen as a key milestone for artificial intelligence (AI) researchers, one system beat a former world champion at a mind-bendingly intricate board game. But then, just a week later, a "chatbot" that was designed to learn from its interactions with humans on Twitter had a highly public racist meltdown on the social networking site. How did this happen, and what does it mean for the dynamic field of AI? In early March, a Google-made artificial intelligence system beat former world champ Lee Sedol four matches to one at an ancient Chinese game, called Go, that is considered more complex than chess, which was previously used as a benchmark to assess progress in machine intelligence.