When people need help with their day-to-day activities, they turn to family, friends or neighbours. But despite an increasingly networked world, technology falls short in finding suitable volunteers. In this paper, we propose uHelp, a platform for building a community of helpful people and supporting community members find the appropriate help within their social network. Lately, applications that focus on finding volunteers have started to appear, such as Helpin or Facebook's Community Help. However, what distinguishes uHelp from existing applications is its trust-based intelligent search for volunteers. Although trust is crucial to these innovative social applications, none of them have seriously achieved yet a trust-building solution such as that of uHelp. uHelp's intelligent search for volunteers is based on a number of AI technologies: (1) a novel trust-based flooding algorithm that navigates one's social network looking for appropriate trustworthy volunteers; (2) a novel trust model that maintains the trustworthiness of peers by learning from their similar past experiences; and (3) a semantic similarity model that assesses the similarity of experiences. This article presents the uHelp application, describes the underlying AI technologies that allow uHelp find trustworthy volunteers efficiently, and illustrates the implementation details. uHelp's initial prototype has been tested with a community of single parents in Barcelona, and the app is available online at both Apple Store and Google Play.

Much of the discussion of the fourth industrial revolution relates to the disruptive impact of artificial intelligence, robotics, biotech, and big data on the world of work and business. It could lead to huge gains in productivity, wealth creation and human happiness. Equally, it may kill millions of jobs, fuel social tensions, and widen inequality. Civil society's place in this massive societal shake-out, reckons Andy Haldane, is relatively unexplored – but it will be profound. Haldane, the Bank of England's chief economist, is regarded as a "maverick" thinker among central bankers on account not only of his views on banking and financial regulation, but society more widely: from poverty ("scarcity of money reshapes your brain and reshapes your decision-making") to the importance of trade unions.

I'm unemployed right now and quite a dedicated fan of AI and the singularity. So, I was thinking if there are any places where they'd take volunteers to help out with menial tasks so the geniuses can focus on their research? Yeah it's a long shot but I just thought why not write on reddit and let myself get trolled. But if anyone knows of places where it would be possible to do it, that would be amazing as it would give my life so much purpose to be involved in bringing about the AI revolution.

If we imagine the future job market as an ecosystem, it will be one populated by both workers and robots. Jobs are evolving rapidly and almost half of them are susceptible to automation. Particularly at risk are not only occupations involving routine, and in manufacturing, which are easily replicable by computer algorithms, but also non-routine tasks. These include a wide range of jobs, from legal writing, and sales, to car driving, and medical diagnoses. This has been seen as a threat to employment in the future, and has stoked fears of a jobless growth economy. Whether these fears are justified or not, some questions are worth exploring: in this unpredictable scenario, who are the ones who are going to survive?

Tank, the roboceptionist, greeted my family and me when we visited Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, Penn. In Hamilton, not once have I received a greeting from a robot. It was fascinating to compare two steel towns; Pittsburgh and Hamilton both struggled due to the decline of manufacturing economies. Today, Pittsburgh boasts of its future as a brighter technology-centric economy surrounded by Robotics Institute, Apple, and Google. Nevertheless, Mayor Bill Peduto is facing backlash as unions are protesting the displacement of workers.