In a scary development, China expects to deploy AI powered submarines capable of executing weapon strikes on targets within the next 2-3 years. https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/2018/07/23/china-sea-power-unmanned-ai-submarines/ China is planning to upgrade its naval power with unmanned AI submarines that aim to provide an edge over the fleets of their global counterparts.

Although some are pitching it as "replacing" human call centre workers, a more likely scenario is that mundane or routine interactions can be completely automated, allowing human workers to spend more time on more meaningful, complex or sensitive activities. Yes, this will probably lead to individual call centres hiring fewer people, it could well pan…

Planning how to deploy people and resources (like water and fertiliser) to make the best use of yield is critical to optimising costs in highly volatile industries like wine making. Using drones to survey vineyards (which takes just 15 minutes), and analysing the results using AI, produces faster and more accurate results – the system…

Although (in theory) any randomly scrambled Rubik's Cube can be solved in 20-26 moves, current solutions are basically based on brute force searches. Given the massive number of combinations (4.3 × 10^19), one major challenge to training a system is the sparse reward mechanism – DeepMind's paper outlines the use of a new algorithm –…

Driving increased "data gravity" means customers are less likely to divert new data workloads to alternative platforms, and SalesForce's two recent acquisitions – MuleSoft (a data integration and transformation company) for $6.5 billion in March (https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/03/23/salesforcecom-makes-a-transformative-move-for-the.aspx) and Datorama (cloud AI for marketing) for $800 million (https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/07/27/salesforce-strengthens-its-ai-capabilities-with-an.aspx) further highlight their desire to make it as easy…

Recent advances in AI mean that it would now be possible to develop autonomous weapons – systems which are capable of making automated decisions to take human life. Elon Musk, DeepMind and others have signed a pledge never to create AI weapons: "We the undersigned agree that the decision to take a human life should…

A big step towards making devices like Alexa or Siri (or more likely Google Assistant, given that this research comes from DeepMind) better understand humans is the development of "theory of mind". By around 4 years old, human children can understand that their beliefs may diverge from those of others, and that understanding that divergence…

Among many promising applications for AI in medicine, cardiology is one with the greatest potential. Current clinical practice calls for manual analysis of a wide range of complex diagnostic imagery, and this analysis is time consuming and error prone, even for the most experienced doctors. Advances in the technology are hampered by ethical concerns that…

Following the controversy around (and expiration of) Google's $15 million contract with the US Department of Defense (https://mashable.com/2018/06/02/google-defense-department-project-maven-contract-not-renewed/?europe=true#ebCfKFgiPPqN), the US government has now signed an $885 million contract with Booz Allen – and i'm willing to bet that there will be far less public debate around the ethics of the applications of technology under this…

Yet another example of the value of simulated training, researchers at OpenAI trained a robotic hand using hundreds of years of  object manipulation inside a computer simulation. The resulting hand movements are significantly more dexterous than anything developed so far. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611724/artificial-intelligence-driven-robot-hand-spends-a-hundred-years-teaching-itself-to-rotate/ A reinforcement-learning algorithm allows Dactyl to learn physical tasks by practicing them in a virtual-reality…