The phrase "artificial intelligence" in pop culture often conjures up dystopian images such as the sentient computer Hal 9000 from the 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey" that killed people for its self preservation; or the cyborg assassin with a metal endoskeleton in director James Cameron's "The Terminator." In recent years, our fascination with the potential of AI has taken a more starry-eyed turn, as shown in the 2013 sci-fi drama "Her," where the main character falls in love with a virtual assistant. In reality, artificial intelligence (AI) technology is quickly permeating every aspect of our lives. From Amazon's voice-activated Alexa to writing technology that helps managers craft job postings, AI is in our hearts, homes and workplaces. And it's only going to become a bigger part of our lives: Experts call the rise of AI the driving force behind the fourth industrial revolution. On a recent afternoon at the NVIDIA robotics research lab in Seattle's University District, researchers use a simulated kitchen to test robots' ability to perform simple tasks such as grabbing objects.

The Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 promise to exhibit not only the highest standards in human endurance and physical ability, but also some wild, cutting-edge technology never visible (or invisible) before at a public event of this size. Here are some of the most interesting technologies on display featuring AI and VR to artificial shooting stars, among others. In October 2017, the NTT Group established a consortium comprising six companies with SoftBank, Facebook, Amazon, PLDT, and PCCW Global to begin constructing "JUPITER", a large-capacity optical submarine cable system linking the United States, Japan, and the Philippines. Construction is currently scheduled for completion in March 2020. "JUPITER" has the speed to transmit approximately six hours of high vision images (about three full movies) in one second.

In May of last year, after a 13-month slumber, the ground beneath Washington's Puget Sound rumbled to life. The quake began more than 20 miles below the Olympic mountains and, over the course of a few weeks, drifted northwest, reaching Canada's Vancouver Island. It then briefly reversed course, migrating back across the U.S. border before going silent again. All told, the monthlong earthquake likely released enough energy to register as a magnitude 6. By the time it was done, the southern tip of Vancouver Island had been thrust a centimeter or so closer to the Pacific Ocean.

The dreaded El Niño strikes the globe every 2 to 7 years. As warm waters in the tropical Pacific Ocean shift eastward and trade winds weaken, the weather pattern ripples through the atmosphere, causing drought in southern Africa, wildfires in South America, and flooding on North America's Pacific coast. Climate scientists have struggled to predict El Niño events more than 1 year in advance, but artificial intelligence (AI) can now extend forecasts to 18 months, according to a new study. The work could help people in threatened regions better prepare for droughts and floods, for example by choosing which crops to plant, says William Hsieh, a retired climate scientist in Victoria, Canada, who worked on early El Niño forecasts but who was not involved in the current study. Longer forecasts could have "large economic benefits," he says.

The dreaded El Niño strikes the globe every 2 to 7 years.

Artificial intelligence is learning how to predict El Niño climate cycles. The hope is that the technology could be used to improve climate predictions and give policy-makers more time to prepare. El Niño can cause severe weather and devastating damage. A phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, it occurs when water warms over the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting east and increasing rainfall and cyclones over the Americas while pulling rain away from Indonesia and Australia. Strong El Niño events are associated with intense storms and flooding in some areas, and drought and fires in others.

On August 29, 2019 I put on a workshop on Emerging Memories and Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University put on by the Stanford Center for Magnetic Nanotechnology and Coughlin Associates. We had several interesting speakers talking about various types of artificial intelligence and the role that new non-volatile memories will play in both training AI models and implementing them in the field using inference engines. This piece will talk about some of the material presented at this workshop. Dr. Shan Wang, co-organizer of the event gave a introduction, talking about emerging non-volatile memories and in particular on Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM). He spoke about how various new memories work--in particular Resistive RAM (RRAM), Phase Change Memory (PCM), MRAM and Ferrroelectic RAM (FRAM).

PACAF's Integration Division Deputy Chief Ryan Raber revealed at the Genius Machines event on 3 September that the aim is to better and more rapidly predict a potential enemy's possible intentions. The planned mechanism will be used to improve PACAF's decision-making process and will focus on events taking place in the Pacific region, which means Russia and China could be the potential objects of study, the media outlet Defense One pointed out. PACAF itself didn't specify which countries' actions the planned system will try to predict. The system is expected to forecast a potential adversary's actions by detecting irregularities in its routines based on analysis of past and current actions. The process takes days when done by humans, but by computer with AI it can theoretically handle the result in "just minutes".

The world's major powers are in the middle of an artificial intelligence (AI) arms race. Over the next several years, China expects to deploy a fleet of unmanned submarines in contested waters like the South China Sea. Russia has tested its robotic tank on the battlefield in Syria and is reportedly working on developing autonomous nuclear submarines. For its part, the United States is in the process of testing autonomous swarming drones. This development has major implications--not just for how wars are fought, but also for the future of American foreign policy.

Many setups in the San Francisco Bay Area boast that they are planning to change the world. However, OpenAI founded by Elon Musk has made a bigger promise than the rest: It wants to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), an AI system that like humans, can reason across many different domains and apply its skills to unfamiliar problems. For this reason, it announced a billion-dollar partnership with Microsoft to fund its work. This hints that AGI research is leaving the field of science fiction and entering the territory of serious research. "We believe that the creation of AGI will be the most important tech development in human history, with the potential to chaneg and shape the trajectory of humanity," Greg Brockman, chief technology officer (CTO) of OpenAI, informed the press.