I can't remember whose idea it was to go out for lunch. It might have been my idea. Of course it was my idea. I start thinking about lunch the second that last morsel of granola hits my taste buds and disappears down that endless cavern known as my belly. Should we order a salad?

One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction. Ex Machina, a Hollywood blockbuster made on a 15 million budget, tells the story of a programmer who is invited by his employer, the eccentric billionaire Nathan Bateman who built a fictional search engine called Blue Book, to administer the Turing test to an android with artificial intelligence, which essentially determines whether a computer can trick a human into believing she is having a conversation with another human. Everything in our online life is indexed. Every idle tweet, status update, or curious search query feeds the Google database.

The decline of a single company culture, a surge in freelance workers, a workforce reshaped by artificial intelligence, and a 13% leap in productivity for companies that invest in employee wellness programs, are among the key trends that will define the state of the workforce in the Middle East over the next two decades. The last of these trends could generate as much as a 0.1% to 0.3% uplift in the GDP of a typical OECD country, according to predictions by UBS. Jürg Zeltner, President of Wealth Management at UBS, said: "The workplace is becoming far more complex. The relationship between employee and employer looks set to change significantly in the coming years, especially among workers who are currently only a short way into their careers. It is important that we prepare for these changes. Not only could they impact us, but also a number of our clients who run and own their businesses."

One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction. Ex Machina, a Hollywood blockbuster made on a 15 million budget, tells the story of a programmer who is invited by his employer, the eccentric billionaire Nathan Bateman who built a fictional search engine called Blue Book, to administer the Turing test to an android with artificial intelligence, which essentially determines whether a computer can trick a human into believing she is having a conversation with another human. Everything in our online life is indexed. Every idle tweet, status update, or curious search query feeds the Google database.

One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction. Ex Machina, a Hollywood blockbuster made on a 15 million budget, tells the story of a programmer who is invited by his employer, the eccentric billionaire Nathan Bateman who built a fictional search engine called Blue Book, to administer the Turing test to an android with artificial intelligence, which essentially determines whether a computer can trick a human into believing she is having a conversation with another human. Everything in our online life is indexed. Every idle tweet, status update, or curious search query feeds the Google database.

It might not be obvious to a human, but an artificial intelligence programme sees distinct similarities in, say, the composition of the subjects, or colour of their outfits. Called Recognition, the AI programme compares current photojournalism provided by Reuters with works from the Tate's collection to find its best match. It pairs the images based on image recognition techniques that analyse objects, faces, composition, and context gleaned from metadata. The AI matches a photo of eunuchs putting on makeup in Mumbai (Image: REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY) with Sir Peter Lely's Two Ladies of the Lake Family c.1660 (Image: Tate) "We wanted to understand how we could bring artificial intelligence into a museum, and how rational and objective thinking could be applied to a subjective thing like art," said Angelo Semeraro of Italian research centre Fabrica. He and teammates Coralie Gourguechon, Monica Lanaro, and Isaac Valentin created the project to enter (and win) the Tate's 2016 IK Prize for digital innovation, which is run in partnership with Microsoft.

Clinton said she thought small classified markings were something else. When asked if she understood the "C" markings beside some paragraphs, Clinton told the FBI she assumed they indicated alphabetical ordering.

Isaac Asimov publishes Pebble in the Sky, his first science-fiction novel. And Earth enters a brand new epoch – according to some geologists. Now the idea of the Anthropocene – the period in which human activity profoundly shapes the environment – has taken an important step closer to general acceptance. A working group of scientists has been mulling over the subject for seven years. This week 30 of its 35 members recommended adding the Anthropocene to our standard geological timescale. The ultimate decision rests with the International Commission on Stratigraphy.

A typical nightmare scenario goes something like this: Robots first replace autoworkers on the assembly line. Then they move into white-collar jobs, writing articles, drafting legal documents and reading X-rays. Finally, the robots, growing ever smarter through machine learning and Big Data, displace even the most highly trained workers. Another scenario: Robots become so intelligent that they not only can beat people in chess and on Jeopardy!, but they also think faster, better and more analytically than any of us. Milind Tambe thinks these dystopian visions, so popular these days, miss the mark.

Call it artificial intelligence with a human touch. This week, two California universities separately announced new centers devoted to studying the ways in which AI can help humanity. USC's Viterbi School of Engineering and its School of Social Work said Wednesday that they had joined forces to launch the Center on Artificial Intelligence for Social Solutions. A day earlier, UC Berkeley unveiled its newly minted Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence. Then on Thursday, a Stanford-led initiative to study the future of artificial intelligence in the next century released a report detailing the effect artificial intelligence could have on urban life by 2030.