When artificial intelligence is as smart as humans, the world will change forever. While technological change itself is neutral, neither good nor bad, AI's effects on society will be so powerful that they've been described in both utopian and apocalyptic terms. And some futurists think those changes are just on the horizon. That includes Ray Kurzweil -- author of five books on AI, including the recent best seller "How to Create a Mind," and founder of the futurist organization the Singularity University. He is currently working with Google to build more machine intelligence into their products.

BARCELONA, SPAIN – Newfound enthusiasm for the latest technologies, such as drones and smartphones, to improve the way aid is provided to people in disasters may be overblown, experts warn. The annual World Risk Report from the United Nations University (UNU) highlights the growing interest in new technologies to improve emergency response -- from drones that can survey crisis-hit areas to social media networks that allow survivors to communicate with the wider world. These can provide important information to the logisticians who organize aid delivery or health workers trying to track deadly diseases like Ebola in no-go areas, the report said. But Matthiasƒ Garschagen, a risk management expert with the UNU Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS), said it could not substitute for the basic infrastructure some countries have lacked for decades. "Too many people see technology as the main panacea for solving all the problems you have after disasters strike," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Night lights, therefore, appear to be an incredible resource. So much so that in countries with poor economic statistics, they can serve as a proxy for a regional wealth survey--except no one has to go house to house, running through a questionnaire. Yet research has also shown this not-a-survey will remain inexact: To a satellite at night, a few well-lit mansions and a dense but poorly lit shantytown can look nearly the same. A new paper from a team at Stanford, published last week in Science, applies a trendy technique to this tricky problem. In order to make night lights more discerning, engineers and computer scientists fed a convolutional neural net--a standard type of artificial intelligence program--a series of data sets.

Are we ready for Ultron type intelligence? This is part of our special series on Artificial Intelligence (AI). If you are catching it for the first time I'd recommend that you start here for some instrumental background and here where I start building the bigger idea behind AI. In my high school years, I remember a brilliant classmate, Matthew (not quite his real name), who got the necessary points at Advanced Level to study law at a local university. I was proud to see him not long ago appearing in newspapers as a commanding Intellectual Property (IP) lawyer.

Check out these smart home startups. A lot of these use AI behind the scene to get smarter over time. This has been a weird recovery -- sluggish and slow to produce jobs and higher wages. In addition to a bunch of unusual international circumstances, the global economy has been incorporating exponential technology, particularly all the artificial intelligence applications above. While the bots are eating away at some predictable job categories, all this technology has yielded frustratingly slow productivity growth.

A dream is successions of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occurs involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep.[1] The content and purpose of dreams are not definitively understood, though they have been a topic of scientific speculation, as well as a subject of philosophical and religious interest, throughout recorded history. The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology.[2] Dreams mainly occur in the rapid-eye movement (REM) stage of sleep--when brain activity is high and resembles that of being awake. REM sleep is revealed by continuous movements of the eyes during sleep. At times, dreams may occur during other stages of sleep. However, these dreams tend to be much less vivid or memorable.[3] The length of a dream can vary; they may last for a few seconds, or approximately 20–30 minutes.[3] People are more likely to remember the dream if they are awakened during the REM phase. The average person has three to five dreams per night, and some may have up to seven;[4] however, most dreams are immediately or quickly forgotten.[5] Dreams tend to last longer as the night progresses. During a full eight-hour night sleep, most dreams occur in the typical two hours of REM.[6] In modern times, dreams have been seen as a connection to the unconscious mind. They range from normal and ordinary to overly surreal and bizarre. Dreams can have varying natures, such as being frightening, exciting, magical, melancholic, adventurous, or sexual. The events in dreams are generally outside the control of the dreamer, with the exception of lucid dreaming, where the dreamer is self-aware.[7]

Can we use big data and artificial intelligence to foster future financial success in today's African youth? Having started with a series of surveys to understand practical behaviours throughout one's childhood that correlate with financial success, Yassi currently leads this initiative across Africa focusing on the creation of personalised data-led mechanisms to nurture those behaviours. Embedding new solutions amongst African youth in underprivileged communities, she will monitor whether via data and AI-enabled technologies such as chatbots, one can influence and maintain their existing drive and ambitions throughout their critical adolescent years. SXSW reserves the right to restrict access to or availability of comments related to PanelPicker proposals that it considers objectionable.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Rana El Kaliouby is cofounder and CEO of Affectiva, the pioneer in emotion-aware technology--the next frontier of artificial intelligence. Rana invented the company's award-winning emotion recognition technology, built on an emotion AI science platform that uses deep learning and the world's largest emotion data repository of nearly 4 million faces analyzed from 75 countries, amounting to more than 40 billion emotion data points. Prior to founding Affectiva, as a research scientist at MIT Media Lab, Rana spearheaded the application of emotion technology in a variety of fields, including mental health and autism research. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New Yorker, Wired, Forbes, Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, CNN, CBS, Time magazine, Fortune, and Reddit. A TED speaker, Rana was recognized by Entrepreneur as one of the seven most powerful women to watch In 2014, inducted into the Women in Engineering Hall of Fame, recognized as a 2012 Technology Review top 35 innovators under 35, listed on Ad Age's 40 under 40, and given Smithsonian magazine's 2015 American Ingenuity Award for Technology.

Apple wants you to know it already does great AI -- but it's'subtle' South Africa's CLEVVA is making AI-powered virtual advisors a thing Polly.ai