Mark Zuckerberg recently handpicked the longtime NYU professor to run Facebook's new artificial intelligence lab. The IEEE Computational Intelligence Society just gave him its prestigious Neural Network Pioneer Award, in honor of his work on deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence meant to more closely mimic the human brain. And, perhaps most of all, deep learning has suddenly spread across the commercial tech world, from Google to Microsoft to Baidu to Twitter, just a few years after most AI researchers openly scoffed at it. All of these tech companies are now exploring a particular type of deep learning called convolutional neural networks, aiming to build web services that can do things like automatically understand natural language and recognize images. At China's Baidu, they drive a new visual search engine.

Viv was named after the Latin root meaning live. Its San Jose, California, offices are decorated with tchotchkes bearing the numbers six and five (VI and V in roman numerals). When Apple announced the iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011, the headlines were not about its speedy A5 chip or improved camera. Instead they focused on an unusual new feature: an intelligent assistant, dubbed Siri. At first Siri, endowed with a female voice, seemed almost human in the way she understood what you said to her and responded, an advance in artificial intelligence that seemed to place us on a fast track to the Singularity. She was brilliant at fulfilling certain requests, like "Can you set the alarm for 6:30?" or "Call Diane's mobile phone." And she had a personality: If you asked her if there was a God, she would demur with deft wisdom. "My policy is the separation of spirit and silicon," she'd say.

Singapore's Changi airport is the best in the world and an awesome place to spend a long layover. So it's kind of a bummer that it's getting a real-time data system that will cut delays by rethinking its operations and streamlining how its moves planes, people, and personnel. It's easy to track people and goods as they move around these days, but that power hasn't really been put to use making airports less horrible. That's why ST Electronics, a subsidiary of Singapore's largest technology and defense contractor, ST Engineering, is partnering up with Changi on a solution called Intelligent Airport. The SimCity-esque system will collect information like precise aircraft arrival times, the location of airport assets and personnel, and crowd movement, and make it available in one place, so everything flows more smoothly and delays can be cut down.

Andrew Ng is the man who helped launch Google's wildly ambitious effort to recreate the human brain with computer hardware and software. And now, he will oversee a similar project at Baidu, often called "the Google of China." Last year, in Cupertino, California, not far from Apple headquarters, Baidu quietly opened a research outpost dedicated to "deep learning"–a subfield of artificial intelligence that seeks to vastly improve computing tasks by mimicking the way the human brain operates–and in the months since, this operation has expanded in significant ways. Today, the Chinese search giant will announce that the lab has graduated to a much larger space in Sunnyvale and that Ng, a Stanford University professor, will oversee a new Baidu artificial intelligence research group that spans this lab and an operation in China. "Andrew is one of the intellectual leaders in machine learning, and deep learning in particular," says Bruno Olshausen, the director of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley.

The peak of all this may be the moment at which the inventor Ray Kurzweil asks, "As Machines become more like People, will People become more like God?" The infectiously enthusiastic Kurzweil is the leading proponent of "Strong A.I.," a brave new world in which a "Non-invasive Surgery-Free Reversible Programmable Distributed Brain Implant" will soon become available. In the keynote essay in "Are We Spiritual Machines?" Kurzweil imagines nanobots--hyper-intelligent miniaturized robots--zipping around our brains and downloading our mental software onto new hard drives which will somehow become re-embodied as us. Immortality looms, if "we are sufficiently careful to make frequent back-ups."

Chess was supposed to be a bastion of human ingenuity, an art machines would never conquer. The smarter they get, the more threatened we feel. We, too, are getting smarter, and computers are a big reason why. We certainly needed the challenge. Chess computers, in particular, have exposed our complacency.

While working in his native Poland in the 1960s, Dr. Michalski devised an early computer system that could recognize handwriting. After coming to the United States in 1970, he expanded the field of machine learning, creating applications in which computers could execute a form of reasoning, drawing conclusions from information supplied to them. "He was a pioneer in this field," said James S. Trefil, a GMU physicist and writer. Dr. Michalski's specialty of machine learning is similar to but distinct from artificial intelligence. The underlying purpose of much of his work was to use computers to recognize patterns that could ease the decision-making process in seemingly unrelated systems.

This has bad results, of course, if you're a human. But not so much if you're a robot and have as many legs as a centipede sticking out from your body. That's why Mark Tilden, a robotics physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, built something like that. At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield.

Researchers dreaming up such high-tech innovations to make the lives of senior citizens easier are convening this week at an unusual technology exhibition at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Woodley Park. The event, timed to coincide with a once-a-decade White House Conference on Aging, is open to the public today. While new tech products are usually focused on the young and hip, the technologists at the 30 or so companies making an appearance here are taking the same components used in, say, the latest flashy "smart phone" to help those in their golden years maintain control over their lives. A watch from Intel Corp. could beam medication reminders to a patient's television set -- or place a discreet reminder phone call, for those wanting more privacy. Chester the Talking Pill, designed at the University of Rochester, is a wall-mounted LCD screen with a built-in software avatar trained to tell patients anything about their prescription drugs.

We've already heard of all the nasty consequences that could occur if the pace of global climate change doesn't abate by the year 2050 -- we could see wars over water, massive food scarcity, and the extinction of once populous species. Now add to the mix a potentially new wrinkle on the abrupt and irreversible changes – superintelligent robots would be just about ready to take over from humanity in the event of any mass extinction event impacting the planet. In fact, according to a mind-blowing research paper published in mid-August by computer science researchers Joel Lehman and Risto Miikkulainen, robots would quickly evolve in the event of any mass extinction (defined as the loss of at least 75 percent of the species on the planet), something that's already happened five times before in the past. In a survival of the fittest contest in which humans and robots start at zero (which is what we're really talking about with a mass extinction event), robots would win every time. That's because humans evolve linearly, while superintelligent robots would evolve exponentially.