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Joke telling robots - an application for AI you probably hadn't considered!

What if, rather than asking the traditional question-What tasks currently performed by humans will soon be done more cheaply and rapidly by machines?-we ask a new one: What new feats might people achieve if they had better thinking machines to assist them?

The image of a robot stepping into the shoes of a human worker couldn't be more wrong. When it comes to technology's most significant applications, we are neither usurped or seduced - because the systems involved are nothing like us in either their function or faculties. As a species, we are not in competition with information technology at all: we are, rather, busily adapting the fabric of our world into something machines can comprehend.

BM's Watson Artificial Intelligence System is capable of searching across vast repositories of unstructured data and returning answers to natural language queries, but it won't replace humans. Instead, the system will augment humans and help us to make better decisions.

Fractional Artificial Intelligence - you will start seeing smiley faces everywhere.

In line with fears often read about in the media, both anti-killer robot activist Dr. Sharkey and Brandeis University's Dr. Michael Bukatin believe that autonomous machines, either superintelligences fighting themselves and obliterating us in the process or rampant autonomous armed conflict, pose a legitimate threat. Another thought is that AI aren't evil (and never will be); instead, it's the humans behind the AI that are unpredictable and often untrustworthy, with short-sighted aims such as financial and political gains. Dr. Michael Shermer sees the likeliest risk of near-future AI in the near future involving "evil humans manipulating AI toward their ends, not evil AI itself, as no such thing will develop."

A great example of AI in action is on Wall Street, where traders and bankers are being slowly replaced with machines. Wall Street is now a lot more sedate and well behaved. Investment decisions and trades are based on algorithms, statistics and trends, rather than prevailing human emotion or gut instinct. Is this is a good thing or bad?

it took decades for saddle makers and carriage builders to adjust to the disruptive rise of the automobile. In contrast, travel agents had less than five years to rechart their careers after Expedia, Orbitz and other travel sites took hold. Financial planners? Mammography technicians? Once the software programmers get their algorithms right, these and many other jobs could disappear or change very in the relative blink of an eye.

IBM has created a 'Visual Recognition Demo' to showcase Watson's latest trick, which allows users to feed Watson an image before it tells you what it believes it sees.

Suggestic, an application and Internet-based platform, is looking to fuse medical advances with a growing trend of personalized healthcare - making interventions specific to the individual patient. The company launched a beta version of its technology earlier this month and has a few thousand people signed up in their waiting list to try out the service.

The Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2017 focuses on three emerging technology mega-trends: Artificial intelligence (AI) everywhere, transparently immersive experiences and digital platforms.

"OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) - by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work - benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome."

"To help space travelers recover from the kinds of mishaps that can occur in the reaches of deep space-mishaps that can end missions and potentially end lives-Lockheed Martin is combining machine learning and artificial intelligence with augmented and virtual reality interfaces to provide a bit more self-reliance to manned space exploration missions at distances at which it could take more than 40 minutes to get a reply from mission control."

"From checking leases at the Land Registry to sorting through millions of documents for disclosure during litigation, artificial intelligence or AI is speeding up some of the most repetitive legal tasks."

Staying ahead in the accelerating artificial-intelligence race requires executives to make nimble, informed decisions about where and how to employ AI in their business. One way to prepare to act quickly: know the AI essentials presented in this guide.

AI is (currently) very good at specialist/single tasks that require brute force computational effort or training algorithms, but we are a long way from developing generalised AI, that requires some form of unsupervised deep learning. There are many things that humans understand but are well beyond the reach of AI, and this will remain the case for many years to come - if it ever happens.

Artificial intelligence algorithms are increasingly influential in peoples' lives, but their inner workings are often opaque. We examine why, and explore what's being done about it.

"Police in Durham are preparing to go live with an artificial intelligence (AI) system designed to help officers decide whether or not a suspect should be kept in custody."

"Innovations in digitization, analytics, artificial intelligence, and automation are creating performance and productivity opportunities for business and the economy, even as they reshape employment and the future of work."

Experts predict a 50 percent chance that AI will be better than humans at more or less everything in about 45 years time, i.e. the point of 'Singularity'.