Each week on a Wednesday Nikolas Badminton, Futurist highlights the top stories from the past week relating to the incredible rise of artificial intelligence and its application in society, the workplace, in cities, and in our lives.
In Artificial Intelligence Bulletin – Refuelling at 2am we look at self-driving cars going about their business, AWS opening up it’s AI, baidu launching a free OS for cars, AI creating drugs super-fast, and Robo-splaining.

In 2035, The Busiest Hour At The Digital Gas Station May Be 2 A.M., When The Self-Driving Cars Show Up

Can you picture a day when you never have to pump gasoline at the service station? You won’t even have to get out of the car. It’s not because they’ve hired more gas station attendants.
It’s because the pump and the car can communicate with each other, work together to select your preferred fuel, and fill the tank without the driver being involved. Like gliding through E-ZPass, you’d be paying with a cloud-connected app that, by then, may be standard on most autos. If your vehicle is self-driving, you should be able to remain happily ensconced in your bed or at your computer while your car buys the gas without you even being there.
This is the future for service stations and gasoline consumers. Today, comparison apps may seem high-tech for your neighborhood favorite, but within the next decade or two, the gas station around the corner will likely be catering to everything from hybrids, to autonomous cars, to electric vehicles, to car shares — and selling them a lot more than just regular and premium.
Read more at Forbes

AWS opens up Amazon Lex AI platform to its customers

AWS said it is opening up its Amazon Lex artificial intelligence service to all customers so they can build applications.
Amazon Lex uses the same machine learning technology as Amazon Alexa. Amazon Lex features algorithms that enable applications that can have conversations and process voice and text.
For AWS, opening up Lex to its broad customer base could give it scale. Google, Microsoft and Facebook are all touting their artificial intelligence platforms. Like most technologies, the AI platform that lands the most developers and real-world applications typically wins the day.
Read more at ZDNet

Baidu Will Release a Free Operating System for Self-Driving Cars

Baidu is releasing much of the technology behind its self-driving car, a move that it hopes will fast-track the technology’s progress while cementing the company’s role in supplying key elements such as mapping and machine-learning systems.
Most of the companies developing automated driving carefully guard the technology and expertise behind their systems, as a series of legal battles between competitors highlight. Baidu’s move could perhaps lead to a more open effort and lower the bar for developing advanced driver-assist systems as well as self-driving prototypes.
“We see a lot of reinventing the wheel,” says Qi Lu, president and chief operating officer of Baidu and general manager of the company’s Intelligent Driving Group. “Let’s innovate at a higher level.”
Baidu will release its self-driving platform—known as “Apollo,” in honor of the U.S. moon missions—this July. While much of the technology required to develop a self-driving car will be made freely available, certain features, which Lu says will include some mapping and machine-learning services, will be accessible through an application programming interface that Baidu will control.
Read more at MIT Technology Review

Artificial intelligence could build new drugs faster than any human team

Atomwise, a San Francisco-based startup and Y Combinator alum, has built a system it calls AtomNet (pdf), which attempts to generate potential drugs for diseases like Ebola and multiple sclerosis. The company has invited academic and non-profit researchers from around the country to detail which diseases they’re trying to generate treatments for, so AtomNet can take a shot. The academic labs will receive 72 different drugs that the neural network has found to have the highest probability of interacting with the disease, based on the molecular data it’s seen.
Atomwise’s system only generates potential drugs—the compounds created by the neural network aren’t guaranteed to be safe, and need to go through the same drug trials and safety checks as anything else on the market. The company believes that the speed at which it can generate trial-ready drugs based on previous safe molecular interactions is what sets it apart.
Read more at Quartz

This robot explains why you shouldn’t worry about artificial intelligence

A service robot called REEM can tackle the question: “Should I worry about AI?” (Recent concerns along these lines have touched on everything from killer robots to job-destroying automatons.)
“The short answer is you do not need to worry about artificial intelligence for many years,” the robot says.
“Artificial intelligence requires a body to interact with the world. And we are very far from creating an artificial body with a brain that is smarter than a very basic animal.”
In other words, there is not yet a sufficiently powerful combination of robot brains and brawn, according to this view.
REEM is offering this take at London’s Science Museum as part of the British attraction’s “Robots” exhibition, which covers 500 years of history and runs until Sept. 3.

Read more at MarketWatch