What makes us laugh is on the frontier between humans and machines. Artificial intelligence (AI) can do a lot. It can pick out objects in a photo. It can help people find their way around a subway. But can it make us laugh?

Animesh Karnewar, a programmer who likes to experiment with AI and machine learning, wanted to see if he could build an AI that was able to generate images of characters in books based only on the book's description, according to a Medium post he wrote. By looking to previous examples of creating images from text, including a model called Face2Text from researchers at the University of Copenhagen, he was able to build an AI and train it on a dataset of 400 random faces with accompanying description. Eventually, the AI became more refined and was able to generate pretty accurate, if somewhat abstract, portraits when fed a description in plain language. The results are low resolution portraits that tend to get the main features right, though sometimes gets details, like hair color, wrong. Take this portrait for example, which the AI created based off the description "man in his late 50s has an elongated face with a prominent nose, short mustache with a receding hairline and brown eyes." It's not photorealistic, but the AI pretty much nailed it.

Apple's much-rumoured, oft-revived car project might be back on the road. The company has re-hired a former employee who left to go and work at Tesla. And though Apple is not saying anything about its plans, he may have joined to help restart the electric vehicle project. Apple's car – said to be named Project Titan within the company – has been rumoured for years and appears to have changed status within the company. At various times, it has been rumoured to have been working on an entire car, shelving that plan, or simply creating a computer that other car manufacturers could include in their vehicles.

A couple of months ago I was at a London insurance market meeting. It was mostly attended by brokers and underwriters and the subject was the London TOM. During a roundtable discussion I mentioned an article I'd just written about big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning. I said as much as 80% of insurance underwriting will be automated before long. Sitting opposite me was a London market broker.

Vienna's residents and tourists do not have to rely on the kindness of strangers or scroll through long lists of website links to find parking, restrooms or other critical information. They can simply use WienBot, the Austrian city's chatbot. Available via Facebook Messenger, WienBot provides answers to an array of user questions and continuously learns from the interactions -- even pre-empting questions as it captures the most frequently used terms. WienBot is an example of how governments can use artificial intelligence (AI) to go digital, one of the biggest challenges for cities, states and nations worldwide. Advancements in AI and AI-powered chatbots will allow government CIOs to customize and improve the delivery of services for the citizens they serve.

This weekend, the Perseid meteor shower will light up the moonless sky, the product of dust breaking off from the same Swift-Tuttle comet that sends its greetings to Earth every August. The richest display of meteors will appear between August 11 and 13. But as you settle down to watch those fragments burn up into nothingness as they hit the Earth's atmosphere, something else will also be watching: NASA's all-sky meteor camera network. Every night, 17 video cameras scattered across the United States scan the skies for meteors. Each one sits in a sturdy white cylindrical tube for protection, sealed off by a clear dome lens that gives a clear view in all directions.

Early trailers for Shadow of the Tomb Raider have portrayed Lara Croft as a ruthless killer. Someone who can hide in the jungle and silently dispatch armored soldiers with sophisticated traps and fast, calculated strikes. The underlying message is clear: The beloved archaeologist is now the hunter rather than the hunted. Developer Eidos Montreal is framing the game as Lara's pivotal shift from reactive to proactive fighter. In 2013, when Crystal Dynamics rebooted the franchise, players were introduced to a younger, inexperienced tomb raider who had never been in a firefight before.

Before video games with swastikas and other Nazi symbols can be released in Germany, they have to go through some major edits to censor those images. Every Nazi eagle and swastika -- and even Adolf Hitler's moustache -- in the Wolfenstein series had to be scrubbed, for instance, even though Nazis are the villains in the game. That will no longer be the case going forward, now that German authorities have lifted the blanket ban on Nazi imagery in video games. Each title will now be assessed on a case-by-case basis by the country's Entertainment Software Self-Regulation Body (USK) and will be judged similarly to books and films. When a game is submitted to the USK for an age rating, the regulatory body will determine if it satisfies the "social adequacy clause" in section 86 of the German Criminal Code.

This week, the French secret service (Groupe de sécurité de la présidence de la République, or GSPR) took down a drone that was flying in the airspace above Fort de Brégançon. This spot on the French Riviera is well known as the summer home of the French presidents. It's unclear whether President Emmanuel Macron and his wife were in residence at the time. The concern over the drone centers on whether it might have been an assassination attempt on the French president. Earlier this month, the Venezuelan president may have been targeted in a drone attack.

Tesla's former head of engineering Doug Field is back working with Apple after he took a sudden leave of absence from the Elon Musk firm back in May. In July, it was confirmed the senior engineer would not be returning to Tesla and is instead back with Apple - the company he left five years ago. He will be working on Apple's secretive'Project Titan' autonomous vehicle team, which been running since mid-2016. The two companies have fought over Silicon Valley talent for years with Tesla's CEO Elon Musk once describing Apple's car project as a'Tesla graveyard'. Tesla's former head of engineering Doug Field is back with Apple after first taking a sudden leave of absence back in May.