Ryan Brady is a digital strategist and social media manager for Digital Response Marketing Group. "Enjoy your com-FORT-able stay," says a robot front-desk clerk at Japan's Robot Hotel. Do you thank the robot for its awkward salutation? Or maybe you hesitate for a moment before shuffling off in silence. If our digital screens are separating us from human interaction, you better believe AI will further tear that tenuous social fabric.

China plans to expand its artificial intelligence products market to over 15 billion by speeding up the manufacturing of products like robots, home appliances and mobile phones as part of efforts to develop new technologies to reorient its sluggish economy. China will speed up the development of its artificial intelligence (AI) sector and create a market worth more than 100 billion yuan ( 15.26 billion) over the next three years, the National Development and Reform Commission said in a statement. By 2018, China shall build platforms for fundamental AI resources and innovation and make breakthroughs on basic core technology, the three-year implementation programme for "Internet Plus" artificial intelligence said. Under the plan, China will cultivate and develop emerging artificial intelligence industries, promote innovation in intelligent products and enhance the intelligence level of terminal products. The programme will involve key projects such as intelligent home appliances, smart automobiles, intelligent unmanned systems, intelligent wearable devices and robots.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: It's Too Late--We've Already Taught AI to Be Racist and Sexist Jordan Pearson Motherboard " 'To some extent, you can think about the AI as a human child,' Clune said. 'You don't want a child to hang out with racist or discriminatory people, because it will parrot those sentences and predispositions.' It's inevitable that AI, just like a real human, will eventually be exposed to some very bad ideas, intentionally or not. It needs to be taught how to ignore them." LONGEVITY: The Immortality Hype Adam Piore Nautilus "In the months and years ahead, the scientific progress--and hype--around aging are likely to grow...The biggest reason for optimism, however, may well be the relentless march of aging itself...'Baby boomers are about to create a silver tsunami in cancer that we are unprepared for. So you bet that those of us who are boomers are going to be pushing the pipeline, putting money in aging research, because we want it all figured out before we really fall into it.' CYBERNETICS: What a Self-Made Cyborg Taught Me About Body Hacking Selena Larson The Daily Dot " 'You have to confront your relationship with technology when you implant something with yourself, but before that you've probably been on the computer most of the day, been on your phone the rest of the day, conducted most of your relationships through the internet,' Moe said.

The family of the driver killed in a US drone strike that targeted Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor have registered a case against US officials seeking murder charges. The case, filed by the family of Mohammad Azam who was killed last week along with Mansoor in the Pakistani town of Ahmad Wal near Afghan border, said the father of four was innocent. US officials described the car's driver as a "second male combatant" but according to Pakistani security officials he was a chauffeur named Mohammad Azam who worked for the Al Habib rental company based out of Quetta, the region's main city. "US officials whose name I do not know accepted the responsibility in media for this incident, so I want justice and request legal action against those responsible for it," Mohammad Qasim, Azam's brother said in a police report, a copy of which was seen by the AFP news agency. "My brother was innocent and he was very poor who has left behind four small children and he was the lone bread earner in the family," he added.

A DNA test has confirmed that Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed in a U.S. drone strike, Pakistan's interior ministry said Sunday, as the family of a driver killed in the strike sought legal action. A DNA sample from one of the men killed in the U.S. drone attack was successfully matched with a close relative of Mansour, the interior ministry statement said. American and Afghan officials had already confirmed Mansour's death, but Islamabad had declined to do so before the DNA test results. Mansour had entered Pakistan from Iran using a false name and fake Pakistani identity documents on May 21, when his car was hit by the U.S. missile. On Sunday, the family of his driver -- identified as Mohammed Azam -- filed a police case against unknown U.S. officials, seeking to press murder charges against them, police officer Abdul Wakil Mengal said.

"Answer," published in 1954, encapsulated a prescient meditation on the future of human-machine relations within a single double-spaced, typewritten page. "Answer" begins under the watchful eyes of a dozen television cameras that are recording the ceremonial soldering of the final connection to tie together all the "monster" computers in the universe. The machines are about to link 96 billion planets into a single "supercircuit" that combines "all the knowledge of all the galaxies." Two witnesses on the scene are identified only as Dwar Ev and Dwar Reyn. "Thank you," said Dwar Reyn.

Last year, a curious nonfiction book became a Times best-seller: a dense meditation on artificial intelligence by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who holds an appointment at Oxford. Titled "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies," it argues that true artificial intelligence, if it is realized, might pose a danger that exceeds every previous threat from technology--even nuclear weapons--and that if its development is not managed carefully humanity risks engineering its own extinction. Central to this concern is the prospect of an "intelligence explosion," a speculative event in which an A.I. gains the ability to improve itself, and in short order exceeds the intellectual potential of the human brain by many orders of magnitude. Such a system would effectively be a new kind of life, and Bostrom's fears, in their simplest form, are evolutionary: that humanity will unexpectedly become outmatched by a smarter competitor. He sometimes notes, as a point of comparison, the trajectories ...

This book is an updated version of a well-received book previously published in Chinese by Science Press of China (the first edition in 2006 and the second in 2013). It offers a systematic and practical overview of spatial data mining, which combines computer science and geo-spatial information science, allowing each field to profit from the knowledge and techniques of the other. To address the spatiotemporal specialties of spatial data, the authors introduce the key concepts and algorithms of the data field, cloud model, mining view, and Deren Li methods. The cloud model is a qualitative method that utilizes quantitative numerical characters to bridge the gap between pure data and linguistic concepts. The mining view method discriminates the different requirements by using scale, hierarchy, and granularity in order to uncover the anisotropy of spatial data mining.

HIROSHIMA – Keiichi Tsukishiro, a veteran in the field of prosthetic engineering, will be in Rio de Janeiro this summer supporting athletes taking part in the Paralympics by repairing wheelchairs and artificial limbs. This will be the sixth Paralympics for the 51-year-old Japanese, who also teaches at Hiroshima International University as a member of the faculty of rehabilitation. "I will have to play a central role as I have participated in the event more often than most other staff members," Tsukishiro said. Born in the city of Kyoto, he first took up the family business of training dogs after graduating from high school. Keenly interested in craftsmanship, he later enrolled in a national training school for producing prosthetic devices.

Just when you thought you'd got your head around the whole Machine Learning thing…BAMN! There's a new tech buzzword in town rearing up to take it's place. And while it may seem like just another Silicon Valley buzzword that all the new startups will claim to be using, deep learning is actually already being used to make some really astounding advances. We caught up with deep learning expert, Andrew Ng, and asked him to explain what deep learning is and how we should expect to see it change the world in 2016. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that essentially refers to trying to map neural networks (the same stuff that makes your brain work).