But it could be a real threat, warn researchers at the recent World Economic Forum. Unlike today's drones, which are still controlled by human operators, autonomous weapons could potentially be programmed to select and engage targets on their own. "It was one of the concerns that we itemized last year," Toby Walsh, professor of artificial intelligence (AI) at the school of computer science and engineering at the University of New South Wales, told FoxNews.com. "Most of us believe that we don't have the ability to build ethical robots," he added. "What is especially worrying is that the various militaries around the world will be fielding robots in just a few years, and we don't think anyone will be building ethical robots."

A bronze bell has been recovered from a Japanese submarine that was sunk intentionally off the Hawaiian Islands by U.S. forces 70 years ago. Researchers from the Hawai'i Undersea Research Laboratory (HURL) in two submersibles, Pisces IV and Pisces V, used a robotic arm to retrieve the bell that was resting on the seafloor. The bell was from the I-400 - a World War II-era Imperial Japanese Navy mega-submarine, lost since 1946. Longer than a football field at 400 feet, the I-400 was known as a "Sen-Toku" class submarine - the largest submarine ever built until the introduction of nuclear-powered subs in the 1960s. "It was an exciting day for the submersible operations crews of Pisces IV and Pisces V," Terry Kerby, HURL operations director and chief submarine pilot, said in a statement.

AlphaGo has won the fifth of five games of Go against South Korean grandmaster Lee Se-dol. The final game was a close-run thing, spilling into overtime with the AI just half-a-point ahead at one stage. The best-of-five tournament, which saw the software win 4-1, is considered to be a significant moment in the development of artificial intelligence. Go is a sophisticated game with more potential moves than there are atoms in the observable universe, requiring a greater capacity for on-the-fly "thinking". In a post on Google's Asia-Pacific blog, top American go player Michael Redmond said: "It was difficult to say at what point AlphaGo was ahead or behind, a close game throughout. "AlphaGo made what looked like a mistake with move 48, similar to the mistake in Game Four in the middle of the board.

When Google's algorithm AlphaGo beat South Korean Go Grandmaster Lee Se-dol by 4-1 last week, it was a significant event in the world of algorithms and artificial intelligence. This is because it represented a new form of artificial intelligence: intuitive artificial intelligence, something which is remarkably more challenging than standard artificial intelligence. The disruption happening thanks to algorithms is happening all around us. The largest taxi company in the world, Uber, owns no taxis, but uses smart algorithms to connect drivers and passengers. The largest telephone company in the world, WhatsApp, has no telecom infrastructure, but sends over 35 billion message per day.

A year ago today, I published my original attempt at mapping the machine intelligence ecosystem. So much has happened since. I spent the last 12 months geeking out on every company and nibble of information I can find, chatting with hundreds of academics, entrepreneurs, and investors about machine intelligence. This year, given the explosion of activity, my focus is on highlighting areas of innovation, rather than on trying to be comprehensive. Despite the noisy hype, which sometimes distracts, machine intelligence is already being used in several valuable ways.

Nineteen years after Big Blue defeated chess master Garry Gasparov by winning 3 ½ – 2 ½ (2 wins, 1 loss and 3 draws), history is repeating itself. This time, it involves the game of Go and AlphaGo, and a team of researchers from Alphabet taking on the South Korean master Lee Sedol. The AlphaGo team has claimed victory in 4 out of 5 games and has accomplished the unthinkable one more time--the machine is better than the human at playing a game with billions of possibilities. Beside the obvious excitement of pitting man vs. machine, why should you care about the game of Go and AlphaGo? The AlphaGo algorithm is powered by a combination of techniques including machine learning that allow him to learn millions of moves and how to play the game.

There is no meaningful sense in which there is an abstract notion of purpose. That is, purpose is something that comes from history. One of the things that might be true about computation, might be true about our world, that would be disappointing, is maybe we go through all this history and biology and civilization and so on, and at the end of the day, the answer is 42 or something. That's the end, so to speak. We got to the answer.

IT WAS not quite a whitewash, but it was close. When DeepMind, a London-based artificial intelligence (AI) company bought by Google for 400m in 2014, challenged Lee Sedol to a five-game Go match, Mr Lee--one of the best human players of that ancient and notoriously taxing board game--confidently predicted that he would win 5-0, or maybe 4-1. He was right about the score, but wrong about the winner. The match, played in Seoul to crowds on the edges of their seats and streamed to millions online, was won by the computer, four games to one. Ever since Garry Kasparov, a chess grandmaster, lost to a computer in 1997, Go--which is far harder for machines--has been an unconquered frontier.

Doha, Qatar - Faced with shrinking budgets, greater competition and increasingly selective audiences, leaders of international media organisations gathering vowed to share ideas about how best to gather and present news. "We are 20 years into the digital revolution of the media," Gary Pruitt, president of the Associated Press news agency, told a gathering in Doha of around 300 journalists from across the world. "Demand for news will only grow from here, but the supply of news will also grow. Much of it will not be of very high quality." He said that "a key component to innovation at AP is to increase work and investment into media and technology startups", adding that the agency has tested drones for news gathering purposes, and has used "robot journalism" to produce reports without human intervention.

Future computers will be smarter than humans, but they'will never be wiser' Internet tycoons have reached a rare consensus on the promise of artificial intelligence following the historic victory earlier this month for Google Inc's AI-powered AlphaGo over its human competitor, South Korean Go master Lee Se-dol. The widely watched five-match series came to a close on Tuesday, with four victories for the machine to the human's one. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook Inc, told an audience at the China Development Forum in Beijing on Saturday that he predicted more great advances for AI within the next decade. "Artificial intelligence will understand senses, such as vision and hearing, and grasp language better than human beings over the next five to 10 years," he said. Lei Jun, founder and chairman of Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi Corp, agreed, describing the win as a breakthrough in artificial intelligence.