In fact, in many countries, the internet, the very thing that was supposed to smash down the walls of authoritarianism like a sledgehammer of liberty, has been instead been co-opted by those very regimes in order to push their own agendas while crushing dissent and opposition. And with the emergence of conversational AI -- the technology at the heart of services like Google's Allo and Jigsaw or Intel's Hack Harassment initiative -- these governments could have a new tool to further censor their citizens. Turkey, Brazil, Egypt, India and Uganda have all shut off internet access when politically beneficial to their ruling parties. Nations like Singapore, Russia and China all exert outsized control over the structure and function of their national networks, often relying on a mix of political, technical and social schemes to control the flow of information within their digital borders. The effects of these policies are self-evident.

The machines haven't taken over. However, they are seeping their way into our lives, affecting how we live, work and entertain ourselves. From voice-powered personal assistants like Siri and Alexa, to more underlying and fundamental technologies such as behavioral algorithms, suggestive searches and autonomously-powered self-driving vehicles boasting powerful predictive capabilities, there are several examples and applications of artificial intellgience in use today. However, the technology is still in its infancy. What many companies are calling A.I. today, aren't necessarily so.

The seminal MMORPG World of Warcraft may have dwindled from its peak of 12 million players back in 2010, but Blizzard's still supporting the 12-year-old game with content and events. To celebrate the latest expansion, Legion, the studio built an elaborate cafe at Germany's Gamescom convention that served themed food and cocktails. But for everyone who couldn't fly out to Europe for some nerd cuisine, they've lined up the next best thing: A cooking show debuting tonight hosted by Choi Hyun-seok, a famous chef known for appearances on South Korean television. The Meal Is Ready, as it's titled, debuts tonight at 11 PM KT. According to GameAbout, Choi a known WoW player, will cook dishes like'Hell Hound Sweet and Sour Fish' and'Murlok Soup' while guests share stories from and about the game.

An ongoing challenge in neuromorphic computing is to devise general and computationally efficient models of inference and learning which are compatible with the spatial and temporal constraints of the brain. One increasingly popular and successful approach is to take inspiration from inference and learning algorithms used in deep neural networks. However, the workhorse of deep learning, the gradient descent Back Propagation (BP) rule, often relies on the immediate availability of network-wide information stored with high-precision memory, and precise operations that are difficult to realize in neuromorphic hardware. Remarkably, recent work showed that exact backpropagated weights are not essential for learning deep representations. Random BP replaces feedback weights with random ones and encourages the network to adjust its feed-forward weights to learn pseudo-inverses of the (random) feedback weights. Building on these results, we demonstrate an event-driven random BP (eRBP) rule that uses an error-modulated synaptic plasticity for learning deep representations in neuromorphic computing hardware. The rule requires only one addition and two comparisons for each synaptic weight using a two-compartment leaky Integrate & Fire (I&F) neuron, making it very suitable for implementation in digital or mixed-signal neuromorphic hardware. Our results show that using eRBP, deep representations are rapidly learned, achieving nearly identical classification accuracies compared to artificial neural network simulations on GPUs, while being robust to neural and synaptic state quantizations during learning.

The internet was supposed to become an overwhelming democratizing force against illiberal administrations. It was supposed to open repressed citizens eyes, expose them to new democratic ideals and help them rise up against their authoritarian governments in declaring their basic human rights. It was supposed to be inherently resistant to centralized control. In fact, in many countries, the internet, the very thing that was supposed to smash down the walls of authoritarianism like a sledgehammer of liberty, has been instead been co-opted by those very regimes in order to push their own agendas while crushing dissent and opposition. And with the emergence of conversational AI -- the technology at the heart of services like Google's Allo and Jigsaw or Intel's Hack Harassment initiative -- these governments could have a new tool to further censor their citizens.

Scientists have pulled inspiration from snakes to help robots detect when humans are near. The heat-sensing film has the ability to detect tiny temperature changes, and was inspired in the sensors a viper uses its skin to find prey. Researchers foresee this technology being used by search and rescue robots in order to locate humans in disaster zones. Scientists have pulled inspiration from snakes to help robots detect when humans are near. The heat-sensing film is a flexible, transparent coating made of pectin.

Scientists have teamed up in a $27 million global initiative to ensure that artificial intelligence doesn't turn against humanity. The MIT Media Lab and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University are spearheading the effort, serving as the founding institutions. As AI becomes increasingly integral in our everyday lives, the researchers say it is necessary to bridge the gap between humans and machines, while preventing the'plagues' of society from being adopted in the process. Scientists have teamed up in a $27 million global initiative to ensure that artificial intelligence doesn't turn against humanity. The initiative, known as the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund, is backed with $27 million from the Knight Foundation, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, the Omidyar Network, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Jim Pallotta, founder of the Raptor Group.

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One of the world's leading autonomous vehicle researchers has warned that the world is'on a collision course' with self driving vehicles. The new technology threatens millions of jobs and raises a slew of ethical dilemmas--prospects that were on the minds of business chiefs and politicians meeting at the World Economic Forum this week. 'Companies are going to have to start thinking about it, governments are going to have to start thinking about it,' said Missy Cummings, the director of the Humans and Autonomy Lab at Duke University in North Carolina. Waymo's long-range lidar can see a football helmet two football fields away and uses a single integrated system'The reality is we can't just keep our head in the sand like an ostrich,' she told AFP in Davos, singling out the coming impact on employment. In the United States alone, an estimated four million people work as truckers, taxi drivers and in other jobs that are under threat when the driverless vehicles come into widespread use--a matter of years, experts predict.

Researchers have created an artificial intelligence program that can predict when patients will die from a heart disorder. It is hoped that the software could be used by doctors to make informed decisions about how to treat patients before a condition deteriorates. The software works by analyzing MRI scans taken of patients with pulmonary hypertension. It looks at over 30,000 points in the heart as it contracts on each heartbeat and then builds a virtual 3D heart of each patient. Coupled with eight years' worth of health records, the artificial intelligence was able to assess what aspects predicted when a patient was likely to die up to five years into the future.