The race to "cure death" has gripped Silicon Valley. In 2012, Google hired Ray Kurzweil, the'futurist' inventor best known for popularizing the idea of the "technological singularity," a hypothetical'super-intelligence' that will one day vastly outstrip the capacities of human beings. As Google's Director of Engineering, Kurzweil's job is to turn the fantasies of science fiction into consumer products -- and Google has invested billions in hopes that Kurzweil's dreams could one day become reality. One notable project, called "Calico," was announced the year after Kurzweil joined Google: a secretive biotech firm researching age-related diseases and developing anti-aging technology. Soon, Kurzweil promises, age and disease will disappear altogether, giving way to "software-based humans" with holographically projected bodies.

One project wants to explore the use of robots to expand habitats when they're already in space, while another plans to use a planet's atmosphere to slow down descending spacecraft to make missions more affordable. There's also one that wants to use a coating that can reflect 99.9% of the sun's energy for long-term cryogenic storage, say to transport liquid oxygen and other chemicals to Mars and other planets. While these concepts sound like they came right out of a sci-fi movie, their creators were able to demonstrate that they're quite feasible. NASA is awarding each one up to 500,000 to develop their concepts further for two more years. Who knows -- someday, our descendants might use one of NIAC's concepts to roam the universe

Japan's three leading automakers expect a stronger yen will cost them around 14 billion in lost operating profit this year alone -- just as they need to invest more in everything from cleaner fuel to driverless cars. After three years of supernormal profits on the back of a weaker currency, Toyota Motor, Nissan Motor and Honda Motor now face a reality check after the yen has turned around. While the recent years' currency boon filled automakers' coffers -- Toyota alone has around 10 billion in cash -- a squeeze on margins will put them under pressure to focus their investments, analysts say. "How to respond to yen rises while securing profits and continuing future investments -- this balance is important," Toyota Executive Vice President Takahiko Ijichi said this past week. The dollar climbed roughly 60 percent against the yen between late 2011 and mid-2015, a huge windfall for Japan's carmakers, but so far this year it is down roughly 9 percent against the yen.

The researchers, Emil Kirkegaard, Oliver Nordbjerg, and Julius Daugbjerg Bjerrekær, used software to automatically scrape profiles and then uploaded it in a set onto the Open Science Framework, a forum and repository for scientists to share data. The info is only slightly anonymous: While no real names are used, usernames are connected with location and answers to the litany of personal questions OkCupid uses to find compatibility. Some of these, like political leanings or feelings about homosexuality, are quite private. As Kirkegaard repeatedly stated on Twitter, the data was indeed publicly available, but the scraping violates the dating site's terms and a possible legal matter, an OkCupid spokesperson told Vox. And, as Vox points out, it's also a breach of ethics according to the American Psychological Association, which states that people involved in research studies have the right to consent.

Baker & Hostetler is the first law firm to announce that it will use a ground-breaking artificial intelligence product for legal research. The law firm will license Ross Intelligence in its bankruptcy practice, report the Am Law Daily (sub. The research product uses IBM's Watson technology, which is designed to get smarter as it is used. Ross responds to lawyers' questions in natural language by reading through the law, gathering evidence and drawing inferences. The program learns from the lawyers who use it to refine its search results.

In the presentation below, Dr. Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind delivered a talk on "General Learning Algorithms" to the Royal Society in London on May 22, 2015. Hassabis is a neuroscientist and leading expert on the neural basis of memory and imagination. He was the co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, a neuroscience-inspired AI company, bought by Google in Jan 2014. He is now Vice President of Engineering at Google DeepMind and leads Google's general AI efforts. Demis is a former child chess prodigy, who finished his A-levels two years early before coding the multi-million selling simulation game Theme Park aged 17.

That's where Google comes in. The company announced Thursday that it's releasing new software capable of understanding written English – and that the software will be available to anyone for free. Called Parsey McParseface – yup, that's a play on the fact that the internet wanted to name a British research vessel Boaty McBoatface – Google's software is part of a programming toolkit called SyntaxNet, which was also released for free Thursday. The move paves the way for developers to integrate language understanding into more software. "Our hope is that people will just use this instead of building their own," Dave Orr, SyntaxNet's product manager, told the Wall Street Journal.

Graphic designers, rejoice – the hours upon hours of struggling to figure out what a type face is will finally be over as Adobe is adding an artificial intelligence tool to help detect and identify fonts from any type of picture, sketch or screenshot. The DeepFont system features advanced machine-learning algorithms that send pictures of typefaces from Photoshop software on a user's computer to be compared to a huge database of over 20,000 fonts in the cloud, and within seconds, results are sent back to the user, akin to the way the music discovery app Shazam works. "You highlight the text area that you are interested in being recognised, and it will give you a list of the top five fonts that match what you highlighted," Anil Kamath, Adobe's VP of Technology and head of the data science team told the BBC. "That applies to an image that you can take with your phone. So, you might write something on a white board, take a picture of it and ask the software to suggest fonts that it corresponds to."

As much as we love to fawn over artificial intelligence (AI), it's still not great at recognizing and parsing natural language. That's why Google is open sourcing its new language parsing model for English, which it calls'Parsey McParseface.' Before you even ask, the name has no meaning. When Google was trying to figure out what to call its language parsing technology, someone suggested Parsey McParseface; it's a bit like Apple's Liam, which has no clever backstory either. The overall AI model model is called SyntaxNet (please make your SkyNet jokes now); 'ol Parsey is just for English. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching!

Robots and artificial intelligence have come a long way since a Roomba entered your home to vacuum your floor and Siri gave you advice on the best Italian restaurants in your parents' neighborhood. According to a 2013 University of Oxford study, half of American jobs could be automated within the next two decades. The study identified transportation, logistics and administrative jobs as the most vulnerable to automation. Others assert it is only a matter of time before robots replace teachers, travel agents, interpreters and a host of other professions. With the prospect of such jobs disappearing, many futurists and economists are considering the possibility of a jobless future.