Prof. Bostrom has written a book that I believe will become a classic within that subarea of Artificial Intelligence (AI) concerned with the existential dangers that could threaten humanity as the result of the development of artificial forms of intelligence. What fascinated me is that Bostrom has approached the existential danger of AI from a perspective that, although I am an AI professor, I had never really examined in any detail. When I was a graduate student in the early 80s, studying for my PhD in AI, I came upon comments made in the 1960s (by AI leaders such as Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy) in which they mused that, if an artificially intelligent entity could improve its own design, then that improved version could generate an even better design, and so on, resulting in a kind of "chain-reaction explosion" of ever-increasing intelligence, until this entity would have achieved "superintelligence". This chain-reaction problem is the one that Bostrom focusses on. He sees three main paths to superintelligence: 1. The AI path -- In this path, all current (and future) AI technologies, such as machine learning, Bayesian networks, artificial neural networks, evolutionary programming, etc. are applied to bring about a superintelligence.

Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business section. Pharmaceutical company Mylan is still in the news after hiking the price of life-saving EpiPens by more than 400%. But keep this in mind: Of roughly 250 million raised for and against 17 ballot measures coming before California voters in November, more than a quarter of that amount -- about 70 million -- has been contributed by deep-pocketed drug companies to defeat the Drug Price Relief Act, which would limit drug prices charged to state healthcare programs. Spending on the measure could set a state record over coming weeks. No buzz kill: New federal rules for small commercial drones go into effect Monday.

Sperm donor 9623 looked good on paper. Ontario couple Elizabeth Hanson and Angela Collins thought they had found the perfect father for their baby. Seven years after their son was born, Collins and Hanson discovered that donor 9623 was a college dropout with schizophrenia, a narcissistic personality disorder and a criminal history. He had spent eight months in prison for burglary, and 10 years on probation. The sperm bank had inadvertently included the donor's name, Christian Aggeles, in an email to the couple.

Imagine if Siri understood every word you said, no matter how thick your accent, or how much you mumble. Oxford researchers have developed a revolutionary new voice recognition technology, which is based on cutting-edge linguistics. Rather than relying on statistical analysis, and running words through a database, the team at FlexSR worked with linguistics experts at the University of Oxford to develop a system based on the way the human brain identifies words. This theory suggests that humans store a very basic acoustic representation of each word, made up of a few important distinctive characteristics. When we hear a word we look out for these, and accept a wide variation in the sounds themselves, whether because of mumbling, or a thick accent. The technology is easily adaptable to any spoken language, and because of its accuracy and the fact that it doesn't have to be tailored to one voice, it is ideal for being used by lots of people at once, and isn't bothered by background noise.

By 2034/35, almost 20% of Australians (6.2 million) are projected to be aged 65 or over. One sector already feeling the impact of the ageing population is construction. In Queensland, the number of construction workers aged 55 and over increased from 8% of full-time workers in 1992 to 14.2% in 2014. An ageing workforce is likely to increase the need for less physically demanding jobs or maybe technology might address this issue. Task automation and the industry's innovation culture are two of the greatest areas of uncertainty for the construction industry.

Artificial intelligence has held great promise for decades now. Since the 1950s, experts have been predicting that the day when computers would think like humans was just around the corner. By the 1970s, as one system after another failed the Turing Test, artificial intelligence research fell out of favor -- the hype largely deflated by the influential book "Perceptrons," by Seymour Papert and Marvin Minsky. Recently, however, a series of advances in computing and so-called machine learning has triggered renewed interest in the potential of artificial intelligence. And while computers might not (yet) be self-aware or able to think like human beings, they becoming very good at learning how to diagnose diseases, find and defend against malware -- and beat humans at games of chess and Go.

A company founded in 1984 to produce high-end audio systems is now on the vanguard of the self-driving vehicle frontier with key financial backing from Ford and Baidu, China's largest search engine provider. Velodyne, a Morgan Hill, Calif.-based company, just received 150 million from Ford and Baidu to continue development and production of Lidar, or the 3D light-powered radar that helps self-driving cars see where they are going. With a presence on three continents, Velodyne is now regularly mentioned in research reports that cite leading companies in the niche field of lidar. Lidar emits short pulses of laser light so that software in the self-driving vehicle can create a real-time, high-definition 3D image of what's around it. In addition to cars, the systems also have growing potential for agricultural equipment, mining vehicles and military vehicles.

This is because every auditory neuron is tuned to a certain range of sound, so that each neuron is more sensitive to particular types and levels of sound than others. In a new study, researchers have designed a neuromorphic ("brain-inspired") computing system that mimics this neural selectivity by using artificial level-tuned neurons that preferentially respond to specific types of stimuli. In the future, level-tuned neurons may help enable neuromorphic computing systems to perform tasks that traditional computers cannot, such as learning from their environment, pattern recognition, and knowledge extraction from big data sources. The researchers, Angeliki Pantazi et al., at IBM Research-Zurich and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, both in Switzerland, have published a paper on the new neuromorphic architecture in a recent issue of Nanotechnology. Like all neuromorphic computing architectures, the proposed system is based on neurons and their synapses, which are the junctions where neurons send signals to each other.

Do you know that two thirds of Chinese outbound travelers prefer individual travel? Data from the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA) shows that Chinese outbound travelers reached 120 million in 2014, among whom 80 million chose self-guided tours. While we can appreciate the various options available in transportation, accommodation, and attractions, it can also become perplexing and even frustrating to dig through a sea of information just for a travel plan. "The abundance of choice allows everyone to personalize a journey, yet filtering out useless and repeated information can be time-consuming and not cost-effective," said Zhang Fan, founder and CEO of the itinerary planner Mioji. Moji means "brilliant idea" in Chinese.

NAIROBI – Japanese and African leaders on Sunday pledged to fight terrorism and emphasized the importance of rules-based maritime order as they wrapped up a Japan-led international conference on the continent's development. In the Nairobi Declaration adopted at the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), the leaders also agreed to promote investment in infrastructure that leads to job creation in the fast-growing region. "Japan's public and private sectors will offer cooperation for the development that is led by Africa itself," Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told a news conference after wrap-up of the sixth TICAD, convened in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta told the same news conference that Japan does not press its own views on the continent and continues to be a force for African development. The triennial conference was held outside Japan for the first time, as Tokyo seeks to strengthen its economic and political presence in the continent amid China's increasing influence.