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.

This paper presents a novel latent variable recurrent neural network architecture for jointly modeling sequences of words and (possibly latent) discourse relations between adjacent sentences. A recurrent neural network generates individual words, thus reaping the benefits of discriminatively-trained vector representations. The discourse relations are represented with a latent variable, which can be predicted or marginalized, depending on the task. The resulting model can therefore employ a training objective that includes not only discourse relation classification, but also word prediction. As a result, it outperforms state-of- the-art alternatives for two tasks: implicit discourse relation classification in the Penn Discourse Treebank, and dialog act classification in the Switchboard corpus. Furthermore, by marginalizing over latent discourse relations at test time, we obtain a discourse informed language model, which improves over a strong LSTM baseline.

MetaMind, a Palo Alto-based AI startup founded in July 2014, is being acquired by Salesforce. According to a new post published at the company's website by CEO Richard Socher -- a Stanford PhD who studied machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing and computer vision -- Salesforce plans to use its technology to "further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes. Salesforce confirmed the deal but isn't disclosing financial details of the transaction or commenting on whether MetaMind's entire team will join its ranks. As a standalone company, MetaMind's general-purpose platform was designed to predict outcomes for language, vision and database tasks. As of the middle of last year, its technology could reportedly answer everything from specific queries about snippets of text to the sentiment of that text.

Elissa Strauss interviews Amy Tuteur, an OB who has taken a skeptical view of the natural childbirth movement. Tuteur discusses the origins of the movements for natural childbirth and attachment parenting ("It's so ironic that [they] are now considered feminist, because they were started by people who absolutely weren't feminist") and analyzes their psychological appeal ("Being a mother is really, really, really hard ... along came this system that told that you are automatically an awesome mother if you have an unmedicated birth and breast-feed and co-sleep. That's so seductive and can easily become a big part of one's identity.")