The story of how the FBI finally tracked down notorious fugitive Lynn Cozart, using its brand-new, 1 billion facial recognition system, seems tailor-made to disarm even the staunchest of skeptics. Cozart, a former security guard in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, was convicted of deviant sexual intercourse in 1996. According to court filings, he had molested his three juvenile children, two girls and one boy, from 1984 through 1994. It wasn't until May 11, 1995, that the children's mother came forward and told the Pennsylvania State Police what Cozart had been doing. He was convicted, but he failed to show up for his sentencing hearing in April 1996. Federal agents raided his home, interviewed family members and released photos of the man to the general public. In August 2006, the Cozart case was featured in "America's Most Wanted," the national television program, under a segment titled "Ten Years of Hell for Three Children."

As robots become more life-like, questions have been raised about whether its morally acceptable to kick them, bully them or program them to kill. Taking this dilemma to the next level, researchers have studied how these machines make us feel, sexually and emotionally. Scientists programmed a human-shaped robot to ask volunteers to touch it in 13 different places. While some of these requests presented no difficulties, people were hesitant to touch'private' areas including the robot's'buttocks'. Scientists at Stanford University programmed a human-shaped robot (pictured left) to ask volunteers (pictured right) to touch it in 13 different places.

Californian researchers have established that an intimate caress of a humanoid robot can produce a physiological response in a human. They challenged volunteers with a robotic creature less than two feet high that possessed eyes, ears, torso, legs, arms and a voice – and a chat-up line rich in come-hither invitations. "Sometimes I'll ask you to touch my body and sometimes I'll ask you to point to my body," it told volunteers. It was found that a touch where the robot's buttocks or genitals would be produced a measurable response of arousal in the volunteer human, the scientists report. "Our work shows that robots are a new form of media that is particularly powerful. It shows that people respond to robots in a primitive, social way," said Jamy Li, a mechanical engineer at Stanford University in California, who led the study.

Humans become aroused when touching robots in sensitive places, a new study has found. Far from seeing robots as just computers, humans can become physiologically aroused from touching a human-shaped robot in private places like their eyes and buttocks, the Stanford study found. The results could have huge consequences for the creation of robots in the future, such as ones that people live or even have sex with. It might also help people create "robot stand-ins", that allow people to touch others when actually being there isn't an option, the researchers said. Scientists have taken a leaf out of the script of The Martian by showing how easy it would be to grow your own veg on the Red Planet.

Like projections about the effects of artificial intelligence, predictions about the impact of pervasive unemployment bifurcate in opposing directions. The darker scenarios involve rapid growth in income inequality that spurs riots and wars and mass migrations. The optimistic scenarios, which Diamandis considers more likely, depend on governments recognizing the necessity of redistributing wealth to some degree and perhaps implementing a minimum income for all citizens. If the most serious threat to both manufacturing and white-collar jobs comes not from China but from Silicon Valley, then much of political discourse shows the same local and linear thinking Diamandis wants to transcend.

WITH the recent triumph of the Google AlphaGo program over Go master Lee Se-dol in Seoul, the doomsayers are in full chorus again over the spectre of Hollywood-style artificial intelligence (AI) taking over humanity. It was the same fear in the late 1990s when IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer beat then reigning chess world champion Garry Kasparov. There are a few differences however: Go is considered a much more intricate game than chess, and AI technology has improved quite a bit since then, and we're seeing breakthroughs such as Google's self-driving cars, virtual assistants like Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana, and even IBM Watson's win in popular trivia quiz Jeopardy!. Enough that even sober scientists are taking note. In a December 2014 interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), renowned physicist Stephen Hawking expressed his concerns, saying that AI poses a threat to humanity's existence, despite its usefulness. "It would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate," he said, echoing futurist Ray Kurzweil's warning of the technological'singularity,' the hypothetical point at which an AI can develop and build even smarter machines beyond human understanding.

A few days before Thanksgiving, George Hotz, a 26-year-old hacker, invites me to his house in San Francisco to check out a project he's been working on. He says it's a self-driving car that he had built in about a month. But when I turn up that morning, in his garage there's a white 2016 Acura ILX outfitted with a laser-based radar (lidar) system on the roof and a camera mounted near the rearview mirror. A tangle of electronics is attached to a wooden board where the glove compartment used to be, a joystick protrudes where you'd usually find a gearshift, and a 21.5-inch screen is attached to the center of the dash. "Tesla only has a 17-inch screen," Hotz says. He's been keeping the project to himself and is dying to show it off. Hotz fires up the vehicle's computer, which runs a version of the Linux operating system, and strings of numbers fill the screen. When he turns the wheel or puts the blinker on, a few numbers change, demonstrating that he's tapped into the Acura's internal controls. After about 20 minutes of this, and sensing my skepticism, Hotz decides there's really only one way to show what his creation can do. "Screw it," he says, turning on the engine. As a scrawny 17-year-old known online as "geohot," Hotz was the first person to hack Apple's iPhone, allowing anyone--well, anyone with a soldering iron and some software smarts--to use the phone on networks other than AT&T's.

Horizon Robotics has a very new technology that will help foster the rise of appliances operated through artificial intelligence. Founded by Institute of Deep Learning, Mainland Chinese start up Horizon Robotics is now claiming it is on the verge of completing the most advanced technology in the market with chips having built-in artificial intelligence or AI for the consumers. "General processors are too slow for AI functions. A dedicated chip will dramatically increase the speed of these functions," Yu Kai, the founder and chief executive of Horizon Robotics according to a report by South China Morning Post. It was remembered that Horizon Robotics was founded in July in Beijing and is now already developing software and chips that mimics how human brains works and solves tasks such as image and voice recognition.

The game of Go has long been viewed as the most challenging of classic games for artificial intelligence owing to its enormous search space and the difficulty of evaluating board positions and moves. Here we introduce a new approach to computer Go that uses'value networks' to evaluate board positions and'policy networks' to select moves. These deep neural networks are trained by a novel combination of supervised learning from human expert games, and reinforcement learning from games of self-play. Without any lookahead search, the neural networks play Go at the level of state-of-the-art Monte Carlo tree search programs that simulate thousands of random games of self-play. We also introduce a new search algorithm that combines Monte Carlo simulation with value and policy networks. Using this search algorithm, our program AlphaGo achieved a 99.8% winning rate against other Go programs, and defeated the human European Go champion by 5 games to 0. This is the first time that a computer program has defeated a human professional player in the full-sized game of Go, a feat previously thought to be at least a decade away.

SoftBank Group will shortly launch a service that will help clients thwart cyberattacks by using artificial intelligence. The company has established a joint venture in Japan with Cybereason, a U.S. cybersecurity firm based in Boston, in which SoftBank has invested roughly 50 million. The Boston firm will provide the service in Japan through the venture, targeting manufacturers, financial institutions and government-related agencies that handle sensitive information. SoftBank will handle sales, pitching the service to Japanese prospects. The joint venture will provide Japanese-language customer support.