Machines are going to take over the world and leave us humans without jobs. This is the meme going around in mainstream business books on the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is understandable as the number of things that machines2 can do better than humans is increasing: diagnosing medical conditions, analyzing legal documents, making parole decisions, to name a few. But doing something better doesn't necessarily make machines an alternative to humans. If machines and humans each contribute differently to a capability, then there is opportunity to combine their unique talents to produce an outcome that is better than either one could achieve on their own.

DeepMind, Google's artificial intelligence (AI) division, certainly thinks there's a risk. They've teamed up with Oxford University to develop a "red button" that would interrupt an AI machine's actions. Their paper "explores a way to make sure a learning agent will not learn to prevent (or seek!) being interrupted by the environment or a human operator."

While we are many years away from an autonomous utopia, where cars pick us up and drive us where we need to go without a human at the wheel, we are seeing the first steps toward self-driving cars. Volvo, Honda, Audi, Tesla--pretty much every auto manufacturer, plus Google and probably Apple--is incorporating advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) into cars we can buy right now. As humans transfer driving tasks to computers, it raises questions for the insurance industry. There will still be crashes on the way to that autonomous utopia, and insurance companies want to know who's going to pay. Volvo, for one, has stepped up to say that when one of its vehicles is in autonomous mode, Volvo is responsible for what happens.

NATIONAL HARBOR, MARYLAND – A new maker of self-driving vehicles burst onto the scene Thursday in partnership with IBM's supercomputer platform Watson, and it is ready to roll right now. Arizona-based startup Local Motors is offering Olli, an electric minibus capable of carrying 12 people. It says the vehicle can be produced to order by 3-D printing. Olli was designed as an on-demand transportation solution that passengers can summon with a mobile app, like Uber rides. And it can be "printed" to specification in "micro factories" in a matter of hours. Olli will be demonstrated in National Harbor, Maryland, over the next few months with additional trials expected in Las Vegas and Miami.

The defining advance of the next decade, if you listen to the prophets of Silicon Valley, will be the seismic and unavoidable ascent of artificial intelligence. It might be hard to take the thought seriously when a satnav sends you down a dead-end country road, or your phone's autocorrect feature turns a carefully-constructed text message to gibberish, but the milestones reached in the past year alone have been exceptional. DeepMind, the British AI company owned by Google, has defeated the world champion at Go, the ancient game that requires a finely tuned sense of intuition to master. Driverless cars now seem like an inevitability rather than a curiosity. Error rates on image recognition technology have dropped from 25pc in 2011 to less than 4pc.

Google is expected to dive deeper into virtual reality and artificial intelligence Wednesday during an annual conference that serves as a launching pad for its latest products and innovations. Although Google keeps its plans under wraps until the big event, the conference agenda makes it clear that virtual reality and artificial intelligence, or "machine learning," will be among the focal points. That has spurred speculation that Google is getting ready to release a virtual-reality device to compete with Facebook's new Oculus Rift headset, as well as the Samsung's Gear VR and the Vive from HTC and Valve. Reporters and bloggers from around the world will attend, ensuring that whatever the company unveils will also be featured in stories, pictures and video delivered to a vast audience of consumers. The three-day showcase also attracts thousands of computer programmers, giving Google an opportunity to convince them why they should design applications and other services that work with its gadgets and an array of software that includes the Chrome Web browser and Android operating system for mobile devices.

Researchers from the Kuhl Lab at the University of Oregon explored how faces could be decoded from neural activity in the study Reconstructing Perceived and Retrieved Faces from Activity Patterns in Lateral Parietal Cortex, published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Hongmi Lee and Brice A. Kuhl tested whether faces could be reconstructed from the'angular gyrus' (ANG) located in the upper back area of the brain through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activity patterns. They conducted the experiment by making facial reconstructions based on brainwave patterns from participants, initially during their perception of faces and later just from memory. Participants were shown more than 1,000 color photos of different faces, one after another, while an fMRI scan recorded their neural responses. The researchers then applied principal component analysis (PCA) to generate 300 'eigenfaces' - a set of vectors used in human face recognition.

To pitch its cloud storage business, Google is leaning on its artificial intelligence features. Amazon, the market leader, is too. Now Amazon has recruited a leading expert in the field to up its game. Alex Smola, a top machine learning scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and research alum of Google and Yahoo, is moving over to run the "Cloud Machine Learning Platform" at AWS, he wrote in a post. Leaving CMU - Dear Friends, As some of you may have already heard, I'm leaving CMU to join Amazon.

A robot escaped from a science lab and caused a traffic jam in one Russian city, it's reported. Scientists at the Promobot laboratories in Perm had been teaching the machine how to move around independently, but it broke free after an engineer forgot to shut a gate, says the local edition of the Argumenty i Fakty newspaper. The robot found its way to a nearby street, covering a distance of about 50m (164ft), before its battery ran out, the daily says. An eyewitness video posted online shows a vaguely humanoid machine standing in the middle of a busy road, guarded by a traffic policeman. It is then wheeled off by a human, presumably an engineer from the company that developed the robot.

Olli will be exclusive to DC these next few months, but Miami and Las Vegas will get their own in late 2016. Local Motors is also in talks to test the bus in cities outside the US, including Berlin, Copenhagen and Canberra. It's unclear if anyone can get the chance to ride one, since these are merely trial runs, but you can ask local authorities if the EV makes its way to your city. If and when the time comes that driverless public vehicles can legally shuttle passengers, you'll be able to summon an Olli through an app, just like Uber. And if Local Motors' plans pan out, a lot of people around the globe will be using that app: Company co-founder John Rogers envisions building hundreds of micro-factories all over the world that can 3D print an Olli within 10 hours and assemble it one.