Since the plagues of the Old Testament, we have contemplated the Apocalypse, the world rising in vengeance as men, women and children scurry across the brutal landscape of a lost paradise. Our doomsday stories and how they scroll and flash before us have changed since the parchment days of the Bible. But we remain fascinated by the specter of our demise, whether the end is wrought by deities, our own folly or imposed by outside forces like monsters, asteroids and aliens that have haunted us since Orson Welles' 1938 "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast. Few of our dystopias, however, are as frightening as the planet gone asunder, polluted and destroyed by humanity's amorality, recklessness and greed. Film and literature -- to say nothing of our private insecurities -- resound with a world that freezes, boils, chokes, cracks with earthquakes, dwindles with resources and succumbs to pestilence and disease.

In a major press conference this past fall, and later a published paper, Elon Musk laid out extensive details on his radical vision of an Interplanetary Transport System to ferry humans to Mars. The first trip aims to fit 100 passengers, and ultimately, subsequent missions could grow to upwards of 200 – but, despite all of the information Musk has shared, where these passengers will live during the 80-day journey remains a mystery. To visualize what the habitation section of the ITS might eventually look like, architectural student Philip Lütken has designed a capsule-based interior plan that could fit up to 104 people, revealing a two-deck area that'should feel more like a cruise ship than a nuclear submarine.' On Reddit, Lütken explained that his capsule-based design would not be for use on the first, second, or third journey on the ITS. Instead, it's designed for when'the system has become 100% reliable and cheap enough for almost everyone to take the 80 day trip to the red planet' Architectural student Philip Lütken designed a flower-shaped capsule interior plan that could fit up to 104 people.

With automation set to have a powerful impact on the future of business and society, PwC has appointed its first UK artificial intelligence leader. Euan Cameron has taken up the newly created role, in which he is responsible for driving growth around this area of emerging technology. He is responsible for AI across the UK firm, helping not only clients to identify opportunities to embrace the shift to automation but also PwC itself. "To be successful, AI needs to be implemented as part of a broader business transformation strategy," says Cameron. "This year we expect to see more and more artificial intelligence initiatives move from theory to practice. We are exploring a wide range of opportunities to deploy this technology internally, but also to help our clients with many of their critical business issues. Different industries are adopting robotic process automation (RPA) and AI at varying rates but with the field developing so rapidly, those who wait could miss out on the myriad positive opportunities it will bring."

Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) may sound like technology better suited to the pages of a science fiction novel, but ready or not – here it comes. Before long, the likes of robot shop workers, self-driving cars and AI-driven smart home assistants will become fully integrated into our everyday lives. But, to paraphrase the words of Jurassic Park's Dr Malcolm: "scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." An article published by the Guardian meditates on the changes the tech will bring our way and contemplates its long-term impact on the world of work. Up first, the optimist's perspective; so far most economists or technology experts can attest that automation has created more roles than it has destroyed.

As AWS continues to support the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community with contributions to Apache MXNet and the release Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition managed services, we are also expanding our team of AI experts, who have one primary mission: To lower the barrier to AI for all AWS developers, making AI more accessible and easy to use. As Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Machine Learning at AWS, succinctly stated, "We want to democratize AI." In our Research Spotlight series, I spend some time with these AI team members for in-depth conversations about their experiences and get a peek into what they're working on at AWS. Anima Anandkumar joined AWS in November 2016, as Principal Scientist on Deep Learning. She is currently on leave from the EECS Department at UC Irvine, where she has been an associate professor since August 2010. Anima has earned several prestigious awards, including the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the NSF CAREER award, and Young Investigator Research awards from the Army Research Office and the Air Force Office for Sponsored Research.

Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, today announced new research from IDC detailing the economic impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on CRM. AI-powered CRM activities will drive new efficiencies in how companies sell, service, and market, ultimately expected to create more than $1.1 trillion in new GDP impact worldwide and 800,000 net-new jobs by 2021 -- surpassing those lost to automation. AI has impacted nearly every aspect of our consumer lives, redefining how we engage with technology and each other. With the convergence of increased computing power, big data and breakthroughs in machine learning, AI is also poised to transform how people work. While some researchers predict automation driven by AI could impact 49% of job activities and eliminate around 5% of jobs, new data from IDC suggests AI could also augment and increase the productivity of employees, specifically in CRM-related fields.

Solar panels stand at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mojave Desert near Primm, Nevada in 2014. California and Arizona by far generate the most electricity with solar power in the U.S. The U.S. set a new renewable energy milestone in March, in data released Wednesday. For the first time, wind and solar accounted for 10 percent of all electricity generation, with wind comprising 8 percent and solar coming in at 2 percent. The report was published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), which collects and disseminates environmental data that is used to inform policymakers. Wind and solar generation typically peaks in the spring and fall when there is less energy demand, and the EIA expects April to continue the record-setting 10 percent trend.

"Imagine a future anthropologist with access to trillions of photos of people--taken over centuries and across the world--and equipped with effective tools for analyzing these photos to derive insights. What kinds of new questions can be answered?" This is the dream that has inspired Kevin Matzen, Kavita Bala, and Noah Snavely at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Their thinking is that the millions of photos uploaded each day to social media provide a fascinating window into the cultural, social, and economic factors that shape societies around the world. With powerful enough machine intelligence, they say, it ought to be possible to mine this mother lode of data for deep insights into our civilization.

Let's do a quick exercise. Did you start at the top or bottom? New data show that the way you draw a circle holds clues about where you come from. In November, Google released an online game called Quick, Draw!, in which users have 20 seconds to draw prompts like "camel" and "washing machine." It's fun, but the game's real aim is to use those sketches to teach algorithms how humans draw.

The IEEE Spectrum this month has a story on synthetic brains. In this article I will review the story and comment on the status of the quest: replicating the human brain in synthetic systems. This article is about neuroscience, neuromorphic, artificial neural networks, deep learning, computing hardware in biology and synthetic, and how all of these come together in the the human grand challenge of creating a synthetic brain at or above human level. Why We Should Copy the Brain: we should do this because we want to create intelligent machines that can do the work for us. In order to do our work, machine will have to live in our environment, have senses similar to our own, and be able to accomplish the same kind of tasks. It does not stop here: machine can do more and better than we can most tasks, simply as we do better than other life forms. And we would like them to do things we cannot do, and do better the things we can do.