Opining about the future of AI at the recent Brilliant Minds event at Symposium Stockholm, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt rejected warnings from Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking about the dangers of AI, saying, "In the case of Stephen Hawking, although a brilliant man, he's not a computer scientist. Elon is also a brilliant man, though he too is a physicist, not a computer scientist." This absurd dismissal of Musk and Hawking was in response to an absurd question about "the possibility of an artificial superintelligence trying to destroy mankind in the near future." Schmidt went on to say, "It's a movie. The state of the earth currently does not support any of these scenarios."

Before the live-action version of Ghost in the Shell hits theaters in March, the original animated movie will return for a limited theater run. In the UK, that means a one-night-only appearance January 25th, while in the US Funimation is backing a two-night stand where the movie will play subtitled one night and then with English-dubbed audio the next, on February 7th & 8th. Afterwards, Lionsgate is re-releasing the movie on Blu-ray and Digital HD March 7th in a Deluxe Collector's Edition with Steelbook packaging and Mondo artwork. Whether you need a refresher before checking out Scarlett Johanssen's take on the cybernetic Major and her high-tech world, or plan on skipping the remake entirely, it should be a worthwhile night out. Of course, if you've just never seen it at all, then we can only recommend you fix that oversight, immediately.

We felt this calm and silence coming over them,

A huge telescope in Chile is going to be modified so that it can look for aliens. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope will be altered so that it can better look for potentially habitable and habited planets in Alpha Centauri, the star system that is closest to Earth. The modifications are part of a deal between the ESO and Breakthrough Starshot, a huge venture that eventually hopes to send out tiny spacecraft deep into space, among other projects. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station.

Machines are coming for your jobs. While this may conjure up Terminator-esque scenes of red eyed, human shaped, robots pushing you out of your office chair the reality is far scarier. I say machines are coming for your jobs because the disruption to the way marketing professionals work is coming from machine learning rather than physical robots. The threat is invisible to some extent – it's in the ability to process information and complete tasks in a more efficient way than a human being can. But it doesn't have to be scary if you break down what machine learning aims to achieve and the role we have in shaping the capability of artificial intelligence.

These numbers are good enough to make any experienced customer support executive cringe! As alarming as it can be, it is an idea that needs to be well thought out before implementation. So to get you up to speed, in this article, we have compiled everything that you need to know before making the bold move of merging Artificial Intelligence (AI) with your existing customer support system. As an add on, we have also mentioned some of the best AI based support solutions available in the market. First, let's find out why AI is emerging as a crucial technology in providing customer support.

Amazon.com hires a lot of people. But the expansion of its army of orange-wheeled robots is more than keeping pace. The world's largest e-commerce retailer said it has 45,000 robots in some 20 fulfillment centers. That's a bigger headcount than that of the armed forces of the Netherlands, a NATO member, according to World Bank data. It's also a cool 50 percent increase from last year's holiday season, when the company had some 30,000 robots working alongside 230,000 humans.

It's that time of year, where we attempt to predict what will have the greatest impact on the IT channel over the next 12 months. These are our top picks. Something that's starting to come up with more regularity, 'unclouding' is the realisation among organisations that the cloud may not be the most cost effective way to deliver all their IT workloads. With the promised cost savings customers thought they were getting not materialising, 2017 will see customers moving some workloads out of the cloud and back on-premise. Plus, in the future, we will see a more sensible approach to where to host workloads.

Over the next four weeks, BBC News will be offering a snapshot of the day in the life of a city - looking at how technology is transforming our urban landscapes, now and in the future. We will look at how technology is improving the morning commute, what it is doing to make our working day better, how it will transform our evening's entertainment and what goes on at night in the smart cities that increasingly never sleep. We start as urban dwellers around the world begin the day - with the morning commute. In the future, that may mean hailing a jetpack. "Jetpacks will be part of future cities," Peter Coker, vice-president of innovation at KuangChi Science, Martin Aircraft Company's major Chinese shareholder.

Scikit-learn is a Python module integrating a wide range of state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms for medium-scale supervised and unsupervised problems. This package focuses on bringing machine learning to non-specialists using a general-purpose high-level language. Emphasis is put on ease of use, performance, documentation, and API consistency. It has minimal dependencies and is distributed under the simplified BSD license, encouraging its use in both academic and commercial settings. Source code, binaries, and documentation can be downloaded from http://scikit-learn.sourceforge.net.