Wonder Woman can still draw a crowd. After this weekend's debut of the long-awaited Wonder Woman (played by actress Gal Gadot) the WonderCon panel "She's Finally Here! Wonder Woman: Her Fandom's Perspective," was packed to the gills (some attendees started waiting 30 minutes before the scheduled time) with people ready to discuss the new Diana Prince. And if the stakes weren't high enough for this character, just read at what the panel was previously labeled in the paper WonderCon program, "Wonder Woman: Will She Finally Be Done Right?" Moderated by Jessica Tseang, the lineup featured Steven L. Sears (executive producer, writer "Xena: Warrior Princess"), Lisa Klink ("Star Trek Voyager," "Roswell"), Barbra Dillon (managing editor of Fanboy Comics), Eric Diaz (writer for Nerdist, Topless Robot), Michael Fitzgerald Troy ("Going Gaga!," "Adele #1," Prism Comics) and Drew Johnson (who worked with Greg Rucka on DC's "Wonder Woman"). So what did this panel of experts think about "Batman v Superman's" new Wonder Woman? See more of Entertainment's top stories on Facebook Here's what the pop culture experts had to say.

By now, the fact that transatlantic democratic capitalism, once the engine of postwar prosperity, has run into trouble can hardly be denied by anyone with the courage to browse a daily newspaper. Hunger, homelessness, toxic chemicals in the water supply, the lack of affordable housing: all these issues are back on the agenda, even in the most prosperous of countries. This appalling decline in living standards was some time in the making – 40 years of neoliberal policies are finally taking their toll – so it shouldn't come as a shock. However, coupled with the spillover effects of wars in the Middle East – first the refugees, now the increasingly regular terrorist attacks in the heart of Europe – our economic and political malaise looks much more ominous. It's hardly surprising that the insurgent populist forces, on both left and right, have such an easy time bashing the elites.

A novel written by artificial intelligence was a finalist in Japan's Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. The award is named after Hoshi Shinichi, a Japanese science fiction author whose books include The Whimsical Robot and Greetings from Outer Space. The unique contest accepts submissions from humans and machines, and judges for the prize, now in its third year, weren't told which novels were written by humans and which were penned by human-AI teams. This year was the first time the committee received submissions written by AI programs. The AI's novel is called The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, or Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi in Japanese.

First went checkers, then fell chess. Now, a computer program has defeated the world's top player in the ancient east Asian board game of Go -- a major milestone for artificial intelligence that brings to a close the era of board games as benchmarks in computing. At the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, Google DeepMind's AlphaGo capped a 3-0 week on Saturday against Lee Sedol, a giant of the game. Lee and AlphaGo were to play again Sunday and Tuesday, but with AlphaGo having already clinched victory in the five-game match, the results are in and history has been made. It was a feat that experts had thought was still years away.

Yahoo! Inc., is getting into the artificial intelligence (AI) game with the release of new internally-built software under an open-source license. Called CaffeOnSpark, the software is able to perform'deep learning' on the vast ocean of data kept in Yahoo's Hadoop file system. Now, the company has made it available on GitHub for everyone to use. Deep learning is a machine learning method that's particularly useful in helping computers come to sort through and recognize user-generated data, and one of its most exciting use cases is where images are concerned. As such, Yahoo built CaffeOnSpark to help identify the billions of images posted onto its Flickr photo sharing website.

Can artificially intelligent robots be our friends? Roboticists and AI researchers are trying to make it so – and the first fruits of their labors are about to come onto the market. But there are already hints that the efforts will touch some of humanity's hot buttons. Take Hanson Robotics, for example: Its latest creation, Sophia, combines an AI chatbot with an expressive humanlike face. She can talk enthusiastically about helping humans in health care, education and customer service.

Many AIs are developed to sift through and make sense of Big Data. But behind-the-scenes, others are acquiring softer human skills and deploying their algorithms to make art. On Monday, Hitoshi Matsubara, a professor of computer science from the Future University in Hakodate in northern Japan, announced that his research team's short-form novel--co-created with an AI--had passed the initial screening of a domestic literary competition. Though their creation didn't nab the grand prix, the human-machine collaboration showed the early promises of what could be, if the team's AI is refined in the future. "So far, AI programs have often been used to solve problems that have answers, such as Go and shogi," said Matsubara, in a report by the Yomiuri Shimbun.

In the face of the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis, a start-up that develops AI is to puts its technology to use as a psychological aid for refugees by having supportive conversations with them via SMS messages. In the midst of a civil war and a near-total collapse of society, millions of Syrian refugees have been fleeing their country in search of anywhere where they can live safe in the knowledge their life is not under threat, but not without great psychological stress on those involved. However, due to the sheer number of people fleeing, and the difficulty they experience in simply trying to find shelter, they are unlikely to receive any form of support for the sake of their mental health. According to The Guardian, however, a start-up that develops AI, X2AI, is to use its systems to create a chatbot called Karim, which will allow anyone with a mobile phone to have conversations with it about their experiences in Arabic. Once the conversation becomes more developed, Karim will use its natural language processors to analyse the likely emotional state of the human on the other end and react with an appropriate response or questions for the refugee.

For more than 30 years, Gibbs has advised on and developed product and service marketing for many businesses and he has consulted, lectured, and authored numerous articles and books. Artificial Intelligence is tricky stuff. When it works right, it does amazing things like thrash the World Champion Go player by winning four games to one in a 1 million tournament. When it goes wrong, well, that's a whole different story, and Microsoft's recent experiment with an AI chatbot named Tay that interacted (note the past tense) with users on Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe, is a great example. Going offline for a while to absorb it all.

It's been another busy week across the tech world, bringing some news that had been long-anticipated, and some surprises that were far from expected. With the weekend upon us again, 7 Days is here once more to bring you up to speed on what you may have missed, so get comfy, and let's crack on… We begin this week with bad news for owners of most BlackBerry devices. Facebook has revealed that it will end access to certain APIs on BB OS 7.1 and BlackBerry 10, which means that the next Facebook update for BlackBerry will lose several major features. On Wednesday, Google announced its plans to launch Android Pay in the UK "in the coming months", but while numerous major financial institutions and retailers are onboard, two of the country's'Big Four' banking groups – Barclays and RBS, which includes NatWest – haven't signed up. We've known for a while that the next version of Android would include split-screen multitasking support.