As the great Kenny Rogers once said, a good gambler has to know when to hold'em and know when to fold'em. At the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh this week, a computer program called Libratus may finally prove that computers can do this better than any human card player. Libratus is playing thousands of games of heads-up, or two-player, no-limit Texas hold'em against several expert professional poker players. Now a little more than halfway through the 20-day contest, Libratus is up by almost $800,000 against its human opponents. So victory, while far from guaranteed, may well be in the cards. A win for Libratus would be a huge achievement in artificial intelligence.

Techies around the world would have been hard-wired for insights last week as the DLD17 conference in Munich and the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos ran concurrently. The former – populated by academics and innovators – was marked by a frisky anticipation over technological possibilities, while the latter – made up of politicians and business leaders – succumbed to fear and uncertainty over global events, even as the sun shone outside. Chinese premier, Xi Jinping, speaking in Davos, said: "Unlike the industrial revolution, our fourth technological revolution is unfolding at an exponential, and not linear, pace". One statistic that came out of the meeting was how Hollywood box office takings have been outpaced by App revenues – even though they didn't exist before 2008. Premier Xi opened his address with a quote from Charles Dickens: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times", to highlight the many contradictions facing modern society.

You are driving along and your car's brakes suddenly fail. If it swerves to the left, three old men and two elderly women will die. If the car veers to the right, it kills a woman doctor, two babies and a boy and girl. This question is part of MIT Media Lab's "moral machine," a platform for gathering peoples' opinions on moral decisions made by machine intelligence, such as self-driving cars. In the coming age of automation and artificial intelligence (AI), such life and death decisions and many other complicated ones will increasingly be made by machines rather than people.

Patrick Stobbs recently sat in a conference room here playing songs from his smartphone, attempting to show how his start-up, Jukedeck, is at the cutting edge of music. The tune sounded like the soundtrack to a 1980s video game. "This is where we were two years ago," he said, looking slightly embarrassed. "And this is where we are now," he continued. He then played a gentle piano piece.

The next iPhone is going to entirely do away with the home button at the bottom of the screen. The much-rumoured – and potentially already previewed – removal of the button has long been thought to be one of the major changes coming to the next phone. But a new report sheds light on how potentially the biggest design change ever to come to the iPhone will actually work. In the place of the characteristic round button will come a special sensor embedded in the screen. And that will be the beginning of a range of new additions that could eventually become an entire biometric system for checking who is using the phone.

Artificial Intelligence proved to be a very unstable field, its 60 year history is a chain of periods filled with excitement and anticipation of the singularity, taking turns with times of total ignorance known as AI winters, when donors lose hope in replacing people by machines, when the general public is satiated with chat- and chess- and fridge-bots. But this time* everything is different. The decade started with a lavish AI spring, flourished with Big Data and the Internet of Things, doped the world with an almost forgotten scent of smart homes and smart cities. This set the stage for something bigger, a new AI summer, a hot and deep summer of Neural Networks: NN based AI, or ANN, also referred today as "real" and "strong" AI: manufactured systems are imitating a network of brain neurons, algorithms are rewriting themselves, computers learning from their mistakes, and showing off with the first successes in science, business, security ... and art. In July 2015 Google released their Deep Dream, a restless algorithm that learned to stare at an image until it sees the dog inside.

Theresa May is due to announce details of the "Modern Industrial Strategy" at a regional meeting of the cabinet in the North West. The new plan will center on ten key strategic pillars, according to the release unveiled by the Prime Minister on Sunday. "We must become a more innovative economy and do more to commercialize our world-leading science base to drive growth across the UK," reads the first point, called "Investing in science, research, and innovation." The government is going to spend £4.7 billion ($5.85 billion) on the new strategy with the money steered to such areas as AI, "smart" energy technology, robotics, and 5G wireless. The project will improve living standards and drive economic growth across the whole country, according to Business and Energy Secretary Greg Clark.

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, young directors who go by the joint film credit Daniels, are known for reality-warped miniatures--short films, music videos, commercials--that are eerie yet playful in mood. In their work, people jump into other people's bodies, Teddy bears dance to hard-core dubstep, rednecks shoot clothes from rifles onto fleeing nudists. Last year, their first feature-length project, "Swiss Army Man"--starring Daniel Radcliffe, who plays a flatulent talking corpse that befriends a castaway--premièred at Sundance, and left some viewers wondering if it was the strangest thing ever to be screened at the festival. The Times, deciding that the film was impossible to categorize, called it "weird and wonderful, disgusting and demented." Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that when the Daniels were notified by their production company, several years ago, that an Israeli indie pop star living in New York wanted to hire them to experiment with technology that could alter fundamental assumptions of moviemaking, they took the call. The musician was Yoni Bloch, arguably the first Internet sensation on Israel's music scene--a wispy, bespectacled songwriter from the Negev whose wry, angst-laden music went viral in the early aughts, leading to sold-out venues and a record deal. After breaking up with his girlfriend, in 2007, Bloch had hoped to win her back by thinking big. He made a melancholy concept album about their relationship, along with a companion film in the mode of "The Wall"--only to fall in love with the actress who played his ex. He had also thought up a more ambitious idea: an interactive song that listeners could shape as it played. But by the time he got around to writing it his hurt feelings had given way to more indeterminate sentiments, and the idea grew to become an interactive music video. The result, "I Can't Be Sad Anymore," which he and his band released online in 2010, opens with Bloch at a party in a Tel Aviv apartment. Standing on a balcony, he puts on headphones, then wanders among his friends, singing about his readiness to escape melancholy. He passes the headphones to others; whoever wears them sings, too. Viewers decide, by clicking on onscreen prompts, how the headphones are passed--altering, in real time, the song's vocals, orchestration, and emotional tone, while also following different micro-dramas. If you choose the drunk, the camera follows her as she races into the bathroom, to Bloch's words "I want to drink less / but be more drunk." Choose her friend instead, and the video leads to sports fans downing shots, with the lyrics "I want to work less / but for a greater cause."

I read a book today, oh boy. Actually, I read a lot of books--not quite one per day, but close to one each week in 2016. When browsing the Internet, I am continually bombarded with stories about politics that cause me to wonder what is happening in the world. I have such a love for progress, but civility, globalization and acceptance of others were seemingly going backward in 2016. As I look through the list of books that I read during the past year, apparently I was immersing myself in books about how changes in technology and social connections can propel the world in the direction I would like to see it take.

Last week's World Economic Forum in snowy Davos, Switzerland, brought a blizzard of proclamations about the disruptive impact of artificial intelligence, along with an avalanche of debate over its job-killing potential. The good news for us humans is that the current generation of AI technologies being used to automate data collection and processing -- such as machine-learning software that amasses more expertise as it analyzes data or neural networks modeled after the human brain -- are more likely to augment the human workforce rather than replace it. Indeed, almost two-thirds of the business executives responding to a survey released last week by IT consulting firm Infosys (PDF) said they believed AI would "bring out the best in their organization's people." The rise of AI, the Infosys poll respondents suggest, will place a premium on skills such as creativity and logical reasoning. Noted IBM chairwoman and CEO Ginni Rometty, in remarks Wednesday at Davos, said: "History has taught us many things. When you [have] powerful technologies, you have a responsibility that they're introduced in the right way." "This pivotal investment will empower our team to accelerate R&D and enhance our proprietary technology with the latest innovations in machine learning and natural language processing while broadening our expertise in CSR analysis to foster environmental, social and ethical performance at a global scale," said EcoVadis co-CEO Frederic Trinel, in a statement.