It was just a friendly little argument about the fate of humanity. Demis Hassabis, a leading creator of advanced artificial intelligence, was chatting with Elon Musk, a leading doomsayer, about the perils of artificial intelligence. They are two of the most consequential and intriguing men in Silicon Valley who don't live there. Hassabis, a co-founder of the mysterious London laboratory DeepMind, had come to Musk's SpaceX rocket factory, outside Los Angeles, a few years ago. They were in the canteen, talking, as a massive rocket part traversed overhead. Musk explained that his ultimate goal at SpaceX was the most important project in the world: interplanetary colonization. Hassabis replied that, in fact, he was working on the most important project in the world: developing artificial super-intelligence. Musk countered that this was one reason we needed to colonize Mars--so that we'll have a bolt-hole if A.I. goes rogue and turns on humanity. Amused, Hassabis said that A.I. would simply follow humans to Mars. This did nothing to soothe Musk's anxieties (even though he says there are scenarios where A.I. wouldn't follow). An unassuming but competitive 40-year-old, Hassabis is regarded as the Merlin who will likely help conjure our A.I. children. The field of A.I. is rapidly developing but still far from the powerful, self-evolving software that haunts Musk. Facebook uses A.I. for targeted advertising, photo tagging, and curated news feeds. Microsoft and Apple use A.I. to power their digital assistants, Cortana and Siri. Google's search engine from the beginning has been dependent on A.I. All of these small advances are part of the chase to eventually create flexible, self-teaching A.I. that will mirror human learning. Some in Silicon Valley were intrigued to learn that Hassabis, a skilled chess player and former video-game designer, once came up with a game called Evil Genius, featuring a malevolent scientist who creates a doomsday device to achieve world domination.

I'm always amazed at people who tell me they would never trust a driverless car to take them somewhere but then happily get into a car driven by their teenager. Talk about preferring the devil you know. Driverless vehicles are likely to be much safer than those driven by humans. The safety differential is so large that insurance companies are already looking at alternative business models to make up for the fact that premiums will likely plummet once robots are driving us everywhere. The barriers to our transition to driverless vehicles, and to other forms of robot intervention into our daily lives, then, are not just technical but social, political and psychological.

Here are some incredibly smart people that are pushing boundaries and/or doing some incredibly inventive things in emerging technology and other areas. Whether it's healthcare, news or immersive technologies - these are the people you'll be hearing a lot more from - collaborate with them now and be a bigger part of the future. Burrell was described as "offering new thinking and fresh ideas to strengthen the future of broadcasting" after taking top honors at the National Association of Broadcasters Innovation Pilot Award for "In Your Shoes" (a broadcast and 360 VR series), Recently working with heavy-hitters like Steven Spielberg's virtual reality company ('The VR Company'), Burrell's work with Oculus has been considered for an Interactive Emmy ("Take Back the Mic: The World Cup of Hip Hop"). Recently returning from South Africa where she created a partnership with Ndaba Mandela (grandson to Nelson Mandela and Founder of Africa Rising), to bring the coding, robotics and emerging technology program permanently to the continent. IN HER OWN WORDS: "There's a strong feeling of uncertainty in the world right now, but when we ask ourselves, 'how can I use the the tools of today and the technology of tomorrow to harness something meaningful and good', we are empowered to reshape our experience of the world."

The buzz surrounding machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) in the consumer world has rapidly bled over into the enterprise. Much of this hype stems from the new consumer trends that hint at the possibilities of AI, such as self-driving cars and intelligent voice-first products like Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri. At the same time, mainstream cloud adoption and ever-increasing computing power in the form of new solutions like Google Spanner are accelerating the development, accuracy and speed of AI's underlying foundations, from data availability and spam detection, to machine learning, predictive analytics and natural language processing. So it should come as no surprise that sales and marketing leaders are questioning what all this means for their departments and companies. At a basic level, AI is about replacing human function with computers.

China's largest search engine provider Baidu Inc announced on Friday that it will launch another R&D facility in Silicon Valley to lure more talent and keep propelling its advances in artificial intelligence (AI), according to a Bloomberg report. The second R&D footprint in Silicon Valley will add capacity for 150 employees, and will be a mile apart from its existing site in California's Sunnyvale that holds about 200 people, the report added. Baidu has put AI development as one of its top priorities for further revenue growth as the company has lost ground to competitors in China, Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group, Bloomberg said. The report added that Baidu owns about 1,300 engineers working on the technology across sites in China and the United States. The news follows Andrew Ng, a first-class AI expert in the world, last week announcing his departure from Baidu after serving for three years.

The AA has just launched Car Genie, a device that predicts vehicle breakdowns before they happen. It's designed to be self-installed, plugging into a car's on-board diagnostics (OBDII) port. This enables it to read the vehicle's EOBD (European On-Board Diagnostics) system in real-time and broadcast the information to the Car Genie app, which is available to download for free on both iOS and Android. According to the AA, which has been trialling Car Genie since April 2016, it will anticipate up to a third of breakdowns. "What we've been doing is analysing the fault codes that come from the device and the breakdowns that the connected members have had," Gareth Adams, the AA's connected car manager, told The Independent.

Uber temporarily hit the brakes on tests of its self-driving cars following a crash Friday evening in Tempe, AZ, that involved one of the company's autonomous vehicles. Vehicles in Arizona, Pittsburgh and San Francisco were still grounded Sunday while the investigation continued. "We are continuing to look into this incident and can confirm we had no backseat passengers in the vehicle," an Uber spokeswoman emailed USA TODAY on Sunday. The vehicle involved in the accident was in a self-driving mode. Fresco News posted pictures of the flipped Volvo SUV that was involved in the crash.

Bill Nye the Science Guy became popular for being able to explain science in a simpler fashion. Maybe you've heard the following philosophical question, "if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Similarly, if you make a scientific discovery, but no one else understands it, is it really a discovery? Herein lies the importance of scientific communication, especially these days when real science seems to be increasingly the neglected spouse of society, ignored and even under attack from different directions. Dr. Beth Linas, epidemiologist, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Science Foundation, and scientific communication advocate, recently sent me the following Tweet: This furthers the need of training scientists to communicate their science rather than just publishcc @bruce_y_lee https://t.co/2i9XRpfU88 The study that Meg Parker refers to is one by Pontus Plaven-Sigray, Granville James Matheson, Björn Christian Schiffler, and William Hedley Thompson from the Karolinska Institutet entitled "The Readability Of Scientific Texts Is Decreasing Over Time" and posted on bioRxiv from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

The last decade or so has seen a major change in technology growth, and a few words have become staple when it comes to answering how organisations are going to grow and work - Big Data, Machine Learning, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Each of these technologies have seen a rapid growth in terms of both adoption and implementation, and constitute pretty much what's driving our technology mission. On their own, they might seem like independent entities which have nothing in common, but at the centre lies the one thing that binds them all together - data. Every action, every click, every online interaction creates data points. Now, clubbing these data points and analysing them reveal some exciting and business-worthy information that can make a product or service from good to great. Data is nothing but information which can provide some valuable insights to companies on different aspects - from consumer behaviour, employee attrition, brand image to revenue forecast, predictive models and fraud detection.

No single post could hope to cover all the new innovations with AI. It will, however, give you an orientation to what is being done and what already exists that you can readily identify with. We have voice synthesisers, text to voice synthesisers, we have robotics in car manufacture, mining, hospitals and Japan even has hotels where the check ins are managed by robots. Artificial talking heads are popping up over the Net and have their uses. Professor of AI Nello Cristianini of Bristol University is world renowned in the field of artificial intelligence.