Cointelegraph talks with AI visionary Ben Goertzel, who shares with us his vision of the future of AI and computing, while also offering insights on how to guide an "artificial general intelligence" toward good, rather than evil. The author and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence, Goertzel is chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society and the OpenCog Foundation, Vice Chairman of futurist nonprofit Humanity, founder and CEO of SingularityNet, and chief scientist at Hanson Robotics. He has been working for years, along with a team of dozens researchers scattered around the globe, to create the world's first AI marketplace powered by Blockchain technologies. BG: I began my career as a mathematics Ph.D. in the 1980s. I was an academic for awhile, then I entered industry in the late 90's and I've been doing artificial intelligence applications in sort of every industry you can imagine from genetics, bioinformatics, and natural language processing.

Last month, I published an article on Nautilus called "Is Tribalism a Natural Malfunction?". It was a meditation on a series of computer experiments in the study of Prisoner's Dilemma, and a reflection on what these simulations, and more complex arguments from mathematical logic, might tell us about social life. The groups that formed in our simulation, shibboleth machines, were unable to tolerate others--and eventually became unable to tolerate the differences that emerged amongst themselves. There were some lovely comments on Nautilus and elsewhere, of course, and the usual rough-and-tumble of Internet argument. What I didn't expect was the robust defense of tribalism made by educated and apparently intelligent people writing on ostensibly science- and technology-focused sites.

As America increases its military footprint in some of Africa's most dangerous trouble spots, confronting extremist affiliates of Al Qaeda and Islamic State, the risk of intelligence failures and more combat deaths is mounting. U.S. special forces who accompanied Niger's military at a meeting of village leaders in Tongo Tongo on Oct. 4 were working in the country's treacherous western borderlands, a region of shifting tribal allegiances, opaque motives and ethnic grudges going back decades, all feeding into a growing jihadist problem. Four Americans and five Nigerian troops died after leaving Tongo Tongo and being ambushed and heavily outgunned by fighters armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. The militants are believed to be from a Malian-led militia, the Islamic State in the Greater Sahel, which declared allegiance to the overall militant organization in 2015. One error appears to have been downplaying the danger.

With messaging apps on the rise, chatbots are all the hype now. Chatbots are artificial intelligence systems that interact with users via messaging, text, or speech. Many are deployed on chatbot platforms such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Slack, or text messages. Facebook's expansion with Facebook Messenger has been giving businesses the opportunity to better reach their target audience through different APIs, and chatbots are becoming a necessity in certain industries. Despite the complexity of artificial intelligence used to pick content and context from conversations with users, there are a number of platforms and frameworks available to build a sophisticated chatbot.

The U.S. has stepped up its military involvement in the Horn of Africa nation since President Donald Trump approved expanded military operations against the group early this year. The U.S. has carried out at least 19 drone strikes in Somalia since January, according to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which tracks U.S. drone strikes in a number of countries.

I was 13 years old when the movie Alien was released. It scared me into a month-long spell of anxiety. The hair on the back of my neck was perpetually up and I had the jittery demeanor of a combat veteran. While the full-grown xenomorph alien was chilling, the larval stage face-hugger was terrifying. Not only did it penetrate the human host's throat, planting the chest-burster in the gut, but it was intrinsically grotesque, an odious, zoological mash-up of scurrying spider and slithering snake. It's easy to interpret our fears of alien predators as nothing more than superficial horror ginned up by the Hollywood fright machine.

Dr. Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com, made his first regional keynote speech at GITEX Technology Week today. Speaking on how an experimental mindset helps drive continuous innovation on a worldwide scale, he highlighted how digital acceleration can create new opportunities and extolled entrepreneurs to work on things that truly differentiate their businesses. At this afternoon's keynote, Dr. Vogels said that the most disruptive businesses in the Middle East are powered in the cloud. Dr. Vogels expressed his excitement to announce that the company is building a presence in the Middle East, which will allow it to harness the power of technology to create a rich featured infrastructure platform for startups and big businesses in the region. Meanwhile, Mike Sutcliff, Group Chief Executive of Accenture Digital at his keynote address highlighted the role technology will play across the private and government sectors.

The ambush in Niger earlier this month that left four U.S. troops dead has been the subject of immense speculation, not only concerning President Trump's public response to the tragedy but also about what actually happened on the ground that day. Asked by Fox News on Capitol Hill if the administration has been forthcoming about the attack, Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., replied, "of course not" and added, "it may require a subpoena." Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday that the attack is under investigation. A dozen U.S. Army soldiers, mostly Green Berets, along with 30 Nigerians, traveled 125 miles north of Niger's capital, Niamey, in unarmored trucks on a routine mission and to meet with local village elders in Tonga Tonga, near the border with Mali, on Oct. 4. U.S. Army Sergeant La David Johnson was killed when his patrol was ambushed in Niger.

This article proposes a Bayesian nonparametric method for forecasting, imputation, and clustering in sparsely observed, multivariate time series. The method is appropriate for jointly modeling hundreds of time series with widely varying, non-stationary dynamics. Given a collection of $N$ time series, the Bayesian model first partitions them into independent clusters using a Chinese restaurant process prior. Within a cluster, all time series are modeled jointly using a novel "temporally-coupled" extension of the Chinese restaurant process mixture. Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques are used to obtain samples from the posterior distribution, which are then used to form predictive inferences. We apply the technique to challenging prediction and imputation tasks using seasonal flu data from the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, demonstrating competitive imputation performance and improved forecasting accuracy as compared to several state-of-the art baselines. We also show that the model discovers interpretable clusters in datasets with hundreds of time series using macroeconomic data from the Gapminder Foundation.

Twenty years ago, WIRED made a bold prediction: Cable modems are on the way out. "Things are looking bad for the cable industry: Careful study has shown that nearly the entire cable network would need to be replaced to make it suitable for two-way data traffic, and satellite services have been stealing away cable's television customers at an intolerable rate." Fast-forward to 2017 and ... cable modems are everywhere. Hey, points for journalistic confidence. Listen, predicting the future is thankless and hard and often ill-advised.