And how can they each illuminate the nature of mind and self? These were some of the questions on Siri Hustvedt's mind as she began her new book of essays, A Woman Looking At Men Looking At Women. Hustvedt herself has an omnivorous professional history that blends the two worlds in unconventional ways. She is an essayist, poet, and novelist (best known for her recent novel The Blazing World), an English literature PhD by training, and lectures on psychiatry at the Weill Medical School of Cornell. In her essays, Hustvedt uses this eclectic expertise to jump freely from the arts to empirical science and back again.

When it comes to robots replacing humans, we might think we have the upper hand since we're the ones who build and program them but that's not neccesarily the case anymore. Google is taking a different approach to training its robots – it's letting them teach each other. TNW Conference is back for its 12th year. Researchers at Google have released a report showing how they connected 14 robotic arms together and used convolutional neural networks to let them teach themselves how to pick things up. The approach mimics how young children learn between the ages of one and four years old, and is essentially helping the robots to develop reliable hand-eye coordination.

The doctor's consultation room is one place where people really appreciate the human touch. Patients who are suffering can be comforted by the one-to-one attention of a doctor. But in recent years the demands on doctors have increased as the population gets older and budgets get tighter, and there is a growing acceptance among patients that doctors can use technology to manage the demands on their time more efficiently. Entrusting your healthcare to an intelligent machine might seem like science fiction, but for those growing up in the digital age, automated healthcare is set to become as normal as speaking to their doctor. Indeed, for millennials it might seem slightly unnerving if a consultation does not involve their doctor calling on some kind of technological support.

DEEPMIND'S office is tucked away in a nondescript building next to London's Kings Cross train station. From the outside, it doesn't look like something that two of the world's most powerful technology companies, Facebook and Google, would have fought to acquire. Google won, buying DeepMind for £400m ($660m) in January 2014. But why did it want to own a British artificial-intelligence (AI) company in the first place? Google was already on the cutting edge of machine learning and AI, its newly trendy cousin.

Here are five things in technology that happened this past week and how they affect your business. The delivery of a Fire TV stick and a bag of popcorn was made from a fulfillment center in Cambridge, England. Amazon hopes that "one day, seeing Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road." My Kindle still isn't working right, and they expect a drone to deliver packages? It's unlikely that drone delivery will be as ubiquitous as Amazon predicts, but you can expect this form of delivery to be an option to get your products to certain far-flung places of the world (where there are no kids with slingshots) within the next few years.

It speaks volumes about the plight of rabble-rousers in China today that Ai Weiwei, the country's most famous dissident artist, has decided that working there is too dangerous -- so he wants to go to Syria. Ai, who received his passport back from Chinese authorities last year, is turning his attention to Syrian refugees. For the artist, who spent 81 days in Chinese detention in 2011 and then was blocked from traveling for four years, it is a way of remaining relevant without landing in jail. Ai reflected on his situation during a trip to New York last month. He said he does not want his 7-year-old son to experience the same difficulties as he did as a child when his father, the acclaimed Chinese poet Ai Qing, was purged after he fell out with former leader Mao Tse-tung and was exiled.

Master everything you need to transform data into action with our Learning Path: Machine Learning, a curated collection of lessons to take you from the basics to coding your own machine learning algorithms. Subscribe to the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. In this special two-segment episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Dafna Shahaf, assistant professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her area of research is focused on tools and techniques for overcoming information overload, an area of increasing importance in an attention economy.

Tableau Software is perhaps the best known platform for data visualization across a wide array of users. Some Coursera courses dedicated to data visualization use Tableau as the underlying platform. The Seattle-based company describes its mission this way: "We help people see and understand their data." This company, founded in 2003, offers a family of interactive data visualization products focused on business intelligence. The software is offered in desktop, server, and cloud versions.

IBM has announced a collaboration with the BMW group to develop new potential interfaces for its Watson AI product into vehicles. The agreement will see the car manufacturer relocating a group of its researchers and engineers to the IBM headquarters for Watson IoT in Munich, with the scope of exploring new'intelligent assistant' functions for the BMW range. Four BMW i8 hybrid sports cars will also take up residence at the Munich centre, as lab fodder prototype Watson-based experiments to run on IBM's Bluemix cloud platform. According to today's release, the objective is the development of new'conversational interfaces' between cars and drivers. The i8's manual will be integrated into Watson's database for the purpose of the experiments, allowing drivers to ask natural language questions and hope to receive a better response than the commonly-lamented AI offer to'look it up on the web for you'.

When it comes to our cars, driver expectations have shifted into high gear. Now, of course we still want a vehicle that looks good, provides comfort and optimal safety, but our feature wish list has grown and it includes a dash of the Internet of Things (IoT). Today, more and more drivers expect their cars to connect them with their surroundings -- whether it's traffic conditions, approaching weather or other cars that can share information, which helps us avoid anything from gridlock to erratic drivers who may be lurking just around the bend. As we have seen in recent months, new in-car innovations are gaining momentum with the latest coming from IBM and BMW Group. Today we announced a new collaboration focused on exploring how Watson cognitive computing can personalize and enhance the driving experience. And when I say collaboration, I mean a true side-by-side effort.