Transcription is the bane of my existence. Yes, it is fun to be a journalist, yes it is fun to travel around the country talking to diverse and interesting people, yes it is fun to weave those people into broader stories about the world at large. But there's a middle step in there in which I come home with reams of audio interviews that I've recorded that I have to type up. And that part is not fun. For my job, I travel somewhere every month and write a handful of stories from that place, which means dozens of dozens of interviews of people who go into my stories.

Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, has personally funneled over 100 million into a pair of secretive startups looking to revolutionize personal transport by developing flying cars, according to a new report from Bloomberg Businessweek. The report claims Page is backing the secretive Zee.Aero, a company that was initially set up six years ago and three years later, moved across the road from Google's huge headquarters in Mountain View. At the time, the company was reported to be working on a flying car -- based on a patent filing -- but little was known about Zee.Aero and who was backing it. The original patent filed by Zee.Aero for a flying car design. The report, based on information from 10 people familiar with the company's plans, including former employees, says Page initially lived in an apartment above the company's offices, but as it expanded, he had to move out.

Apple Inc announced a series of long-awaited enhancements to its App Store on Wednesday, but the new features may not ease concerns of developers and analysts who say that the App Store model - and the very idea of the single-purpose app - has seen its best days. The revamped App Store will let developers advertise their wares in search results and give developers a bigger cut of revenues on subscription apps, while Apple said it has already dramatically sped up its app-approval process. The goal is to sustain the virtuous cycle at the heart of the hugely lucrative iPhone business. Software developers make apps for the iPhone because its customers are willing to pay, and those customers, in turn, pay a premium for the device because it has the best apps. The store is now more strategically important than ever for Apple as sales of the iPhone begin to level off and the company looks to software and services to fill the gap.

Whether the Orcs and humans of "Warcraft" can appeal to American moviegoers remains an open question, but there's little doubt about their pull in China. The Legendary Pictures and Universal Pictures film has grossed up to 92 million in China in its first two days of release, according to studio estimates. In local currency terms, the movie is outpacing last year's blockbuster "Furious 7," which eventually scored 391 million in the country. "Warcraft," based on the popular "World of Warcraft" game from Blizzard Entertainment, pulled in more than 44 million in Chinese ticket sales Thursday, its second day in release, easily topping the previous record set by local production "The Mermaid" earlier this year. The new movie accounted for 81% of the China box office on Thursday.

Machine learning and computer vision methods have recently received a lot of attention, in particular when it comes to data analytics. The success of deep neural networks that can help cars drive autonomously and make smartphones recognize speech and translate text attests to the value of using machine learning methods to tackle complex real-world problems. A further prominent example is the success of Google's AlphaGo AI that defeated the world champion Lee Sedol in playing Go. This is remarkable in particular since Go has previously been considered as one of the most complex games due to the larger number of game states. As the amount of data collected by cameras and scientific instruments continues to rise, automated analysis methods will become ever more important in the future. Reappearing workflows, such as the segmentation of structures, will likely be either fully automated or supported by computers.

The temptation for bankers to rush to adopt the technology is clear. However, a good rule of thumb in banking is that if you're tempted to do something that will bring in easy money, don't do it. And AI has trouble written all over it. In 2013, AI taught itself to play Tetris. Eventually, it learned that the easiest way to avoid losing was simply to pause the game.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has flown beneath the radar for the first six decades of its development, and just recently it's exploded into public consciousness, according to Neil Jacobstein. The AI & Robotics co-chair at Singularity University and former CEO of Teknowledge Corporation believes the combination of humans, AI, and good business processes is disrupting the very ground we stand on in financial technology (Fintech) and beyond as we already use machine learning tools to augment the power of the human brain. At Singularity University's Exponential Finance conference today, Jacobstein pointed to examples like Google's AlphaGo wiping the floor with world champion Lee Sedol, and how quickly the world shifted from a state of shock to seizing the scientific opportunity. Soon after seeing its human champion so thoroughly beaten by a machine, South Korea announced a plan to spend 840 million by 2020 to boost AI research and development (R&D), and to create a research institute where six of the country's highest profile tech companies--Samsung, LG, SK Telecom SKT, KT, Naver, and Hyundai--will each invest up to 3 billion in AI R&D. He also mentioned Facebook's DeepText AI language comprehension and categorization, as well as Viv, saying that calling it another personal assistant misses the point.

Writers, prepare to be made obsolete. An artificial intelligence program has written a sci-fi screenplay, which real-life actors have turned into a nine minute film. Sunspring was made by director Oscar Sharp for the annual Sci-Fi London film festival, written by a recurrent neural network that called itself "Benjamin." The film, which debuted on Ars Technica on Thursday, is equal parts bizarre, emotional and intriguing. Sunspring stars Thomas Middleditch (from Silicon Valley) as a character called H, who pines after Elisabeth Gray, who also plays a character called H. Humphrey Ker seems to be the second H's partner, and he's called C, but even that's not entirely certain.

Knowing that an AI wrote Sunspring makes the movie more fun to watch, especially once you know how the cast and crew put it together. Director Oscar Sharp made the movie for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival that includes the 48-Hour Film Challenge, where contestants are given a set of prompts (mostly props and lines) that have to appear in a movie they make over the next two days. Sharp's longtime collaborator, Ross Goodwin, is an AI researcher at New York University, and he supplied the movie's AI writer, initially called Jetson. As the cast gathered around a tiny printer, Benjamin spat out the screenplay, complete with almost impossible stage directions like "He is standing in the stars and sitting on the floor." Then Sharp randomly assigned roles to the actors in the room.