Is it possible that someday we will elect an AI president? Given some of the recent occupants of the White House, many might consider it an upgrade. After all, humans are prone to making decisions based on ego, anger, and the need for self-aggrandizement, not the common good. An artificially intelligent president could be trained to maximize happiness for the most people without infringing on civil liberties. It might even learn that it's a good idea to tweet less--or not at all.

Message from the world's best StarCraft players to the world's most advanced AI: bring it on. The space-war computer game is widely regarded as the ultimate challenge for AI programs due to its complexity and rapid pace. Expectations for a match-up between a professional StarCraft player and sophisticated AI ratcheted up last year after an AI program beat a highly ranked human player at Go, one of the world's most difficult board games. At the time, a number of AI experts pointed to StarCraft as the next target for an AI-versus-man showdown. Among them: Demis Hassabis, the founder and CEO of DeepMind, the AI-focused division of Alphabet that created the triumphant Go-playing AI program, AlphaGo.

Google will make it harder for that friend in your group to make excuses when chipping in for food. The tech titan's voice assistant will be able send personal payments for you in the coming months, just like its rival Siri can, so long you're in the US. Simply tell it to "Send John $10 for pizza" or something similar and authenticate the transaction with your fingerprint or password to send cash. Your recipient will then receive an email about your payment. The big G recently tweaked its API to make any card associated with your account available on all its apps and on third-party applications that use Google Payments.

A world renowned pioneer in social robotics, Cynthia Breazeal splits her time as an Associate Professor at MIT, where she received her PhD and founded the Personal Robots Group, and Founder and Chief Scientist of Jibo, a personal robotics company with over $85 million in funding. While Breazeal's work has won numerous academic awards, industry accolades, and media attention, she had to fight early skepticism in the 1990s from other experts in robotics and AI. At the time, robots were seen as physical and industrial tools, not social or emotional companions. Her first social robot, Kismet, was unfairly called out in popular press as "useless". Breazeal bucked the trend with a very different vision: "I wanted to create robots with social and emotional intelligence that could work in collaborative partnership with people. In 2-5 years, I see social robots helping families with things that really matter, like education, health, eldercare, entertainment, and companionship." She hopes her work and influence will inspire others to create robots "not only with smarts, but with heart, too."

The days of teaching yourself Japanese exclusively through Crunchyroll shows are coming to an end. Online language learning company Duolingo announced on Wednesday that it has released a Japanese language course for its iOS app with an Android version dropping soon. This won't be some dumbed-down anglicized lesson plan either. Rather than using romaji, which are Japanese words spelled out with Roman letters (ie, "kawaii" or "Hi de koroshimasu"), this language course will teach you to understand 100 Kanji and all the Hiragana characters. And unlike some of Duolingo's other language courses, whose exercises sometimes more closely resembled MadLibs entries than anything you'd ever expect to hear someone actually say, the Japanese course features a strong focus on real-world interactions like ordering food and asking directions.

To the average person, the two tables appear to be different sizes – one seems to be long and narrow and the other resembles a square. However, what has sent shocks around the internet is that both tables are identical. Called the Shepard's tabletop illusion, this phenomenon plays tricks on the way we perceive depth and by manipulating the tabletops, viewers will then see that they are the same shape. To the average person, the two tables appear to be different sizes – one seems to be long and narrow and the other resembles a square. This phenomenon plays tricks on the way we perceive depth and by manipulating the tabletops, viewers will then see that they are the same shape.

Applying information technology for the greater good is not a new concept. DataKind has been around since 2011, and the Social Good Hub at SXSW is in its fourth year. However, an interesting inflection point is drawing near as technology begins to take a quantum leap in societal impact at the same time that humanity is facing profound global challenges. Consider, for example, Star Trek-like advances in 3D-printed food that might help stem growing world hunger. While such technologies still have a ways to go before they can feed the world's population, there is burgeoning interest in the ways that artificial intelligence (AI) technologies could help address society's most pressing concerns, as well as the ethical considerations of applying these advanced resources.

An art installation by Agatha Haines, titled "Transfiguration," is displayed at the Art Science museum in Singapore. The exhibits, involving artificial intelligence, life-like robots and genetic modification, are part of HUMAN, a collection of futuristic works from more than 40 international artists, scientists, technologists and designers.

Summary: We are swept up by the rapid advances in AI and deep learning, and tend to laugh off AI's failures as good fodder for YouTube videos. But those failures are starting to add up. It's time to take a hard look at the weaknesses in AI and where that's leading us. Trying to spot new themes and directions I was trolling through some data and I found this. This is the Google Trends chart of searches for'Artificial Intelligence' for the last four years.

Japan is one of the advanced countries in the AI and robot industries. At the Ise-Shima G-7 summit meeting in Japan in May, world leaders looked amused and fascinated when they watched a robot performing at the International Media Center. At the same time, because of the technological advances and advent of robots, the leaders are concerned that many people in their countries will lose jobs and cry out for assistance from governments. This kind of downside to innovations has been well recorded in the history of modernization. Innovations bring fundamental changes to many traditional business procedures, jobs and professions. But the impact AI will generate is said to be on a far larger scale than previous innovations.