In March, Microsoft revealed that it was using the open-world game Minecraft to train AI agents to learn how to do things like climbing a hill. The company also promised to make it available to the public so they could work on their own artificial intelligence projects and research, and it's finally available today. Project Malmo (formerly known as Project AIX) is a Minecraft mod that works on Windows, Mac and Linux, and supports just about any programming language you might want to use. So yes, that means you will need to know how to code – but Microsoft says that even novice programmers can get in on the action. You can learn more about Project Malmo here and grab the mod from this GitHub repository to try it for yourself.

Activists Cheer On EU's'Right To An Explanation' For Algorithmic Decisions, But How Will It Work When There's Nothing To Explain? I saw a lot of excitement and happiness a week or so ago around some reports that the EU's new General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) might possibly include a "right to an explanation" for algorithmic decisions. It's not clear if this is absolutely true, but it's based on a reading of the agreed upon text of the GDPR, which is scheduled to go into effect in two years. Slated to take effect as law across the EU in 2018, it will restrict automated individual decision-making (that is, algorithms that make decisions based on user-level predictors) which "significantly affect" users. The law will also create a "right to explanation," whereby a user can ask for an explanation of an algorithmic decision that was made about them.

For more than 30 years, Gibbs has advised on and developed product and service marketing for many businesses and he has consulted, lectured, and authored numerous articles and books. So the UK has just given itself a national headache. Whether you think the Brexit was the right decision or a dangerous and unmitigated screw-up (as I do), the consequences of the referendum will be non-trivial and take years to complete. But the mechanics of the UK exiting the European Union aside, the question of how people now feel about the Brexit is interesting. Are they awash in jubilation or has buyer's remorse set in?

This week, self-driving Tesla had a fatal crash. Other than that – a lot about robots, can AI create an art, cloning animals and more! Ray Kurzweil and people like him believe the Singularity is just behind the corner and promise the new perfect world. They are very optimistic about the future. But sometimes you should listen to the other side to better understand the problem or vision.

Some scientists are hard at work making a "kill switch" to overpower a too-strong AI and protect us, if needed. Others are specifically teaching robots how to hunt prey, also to help us. Researchers at the University of Zurich's Institute of Neuroinformatics are teaching a small, truck-shaped robot to see, track, and hunt its prey (another small, truck-shaped robot). The predator robot uses an advanced "silicon retina" to see instead of a traditional camera. This "silicon retina," which is modeled after animals' eyes, uses pixels to smoothly detect changes in real time instead of slowly processing frame-by-frame images.

After sniper fire struck 12 police officers at a rally in downtown Dallas, killing five, police cornered a single suspect in a parking garage. After a prolonged exchange of gunfire and a five-hour-long standoff, police made what experts say was an unprecedented decision: to send in a police robot, jury-rigged with a bomb. "We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was," Dallas Police Chief David Brown told a news conference Friday. "Other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger. The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb."

The Juno space probe is now in orbit around Jupiter, meaning space buffs around the world are eagerly awaiting whatever new data the probe sends back. One of those space buffs is science fiction author Stephen Baxter, who recently collaborated with Alastair Reynolds on the novel The Medusa Chronicles. The book is an authorized sequel to Arthur C. Clarke's famous 1971 novella "A Meeting with Medusa," about an astronaut who discovers intelligent life on Jupiter. "All this comes from Carl Sagan, the great astronomer, who hypothesized that somewhere in Jupiter's deep cloud layers … you could have a great ocean, a gaseous ocean, where gigantic creatures could live," Baxter says in Episode 211 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Baxter is well-positioned to carry on Clarke's legacy, having collaborated with Clarke on four novels, a process that was sometimes complicated by the fact that the two men lived on different continents.

Machines that "learn" and make decisions on their own are proliferating in our daily lives via social networks and smartphones, and experts are already thinking about how we can engineer them so that they don't go rogue. So far, suggestions have ranged from "training" self-learning machines to ignore certain kinds of information that might teach them racism or sexism, to coding them with values like empathy and respect. But according to some new work from researchers at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid,as well as other schools in Spain, the US, and Australia, once an AI becomes "superintelligent"--think Ex Machina--it will be impossible to contain it. Well, the researchers use the word "incomputable" in their paper, posted on the ArXiv preprint server, which in the world of theoretical computer science is perhaps even more damning. The crux of the matter is the "halting problem" devised by Alan Turing, which holds that no algorithm is able to correctly predict whether another algorithm will run forever or whether it will eventually halt--that is, stop running.

Daniel Dennett (1942 –) is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research is in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and a University Professor at Tufts University. He received his PhD from Oxford University in 1965 where he studied under the eminent philosopher Gilbert Ryle. In his book, DARWIN'S DANGEROUS IDEA: EVOLUTION AND THE MEANINGS OF LIFE, Dennett present a thought experiment that defends strong artificial intelligence (SAI)--one that matches or exceeds human intelligence.[1] Dennett asks you to suppose that you want to live in the 25th century and the only available technology for that purpose involves putting your body in a cryonic chamber where you will be frozen in a deep coma and later awakened.

In May, a Tesla TSLA 0.39 % "autopilot" enthusiast in Florida became the first known fatality in a self-driving car. But this was no ordinary accident. The car performed exactly as designed, and the (non)driver's failure to take any corrective action could reasonably have been foreseen by the manufacturer. This unwelcome yet widely anticipated milestone may set back progress on what promises to be one of the most valuable technologies of the 21st century. In its rush to get hot new products into consumers' hands, Tesla--along with many other car manufacturers--has pursued a flawed vision of the future, one in which tomorrow's technology is simply layered on top of today's.