Amid surging investment in artificial intelligence over the past few years and continuing concern about the implications of the technology, the White House announced on Tuesday that it intends to hold a series of workshops and form an inter-agency working group to examine the benefits and risks of AI. In a blog post, Ed Felten, Deputy US Chief Technology Officer, framed the issue in a way that excludes speculative scenarios presenting AI as a threat to humanity, a concern raised by the likes of Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk. While worries about runaway malevolent AI are often raised in public discussions of the technology, real AI research is more mundane, as in Google's effort to improve the conversational capabilities of its software by feeding it romance novels. "Today's AI is confined to narrow, specific tasks, and isn't anything like the general, adaptable intelligence that humans exhibit," said Felten. "Despite this, AI's influence on the world is growing. The rate of progress we have seen will have broad implications for fields ranging from healthcare to image- and voice-recognition."

Unexpected convergent consequences…this is what happens when eight different exponential technologies all explode onto the scene at once. This post (the third of seven) is a look at virtual and augmented reality. Future posts will look at other tech areas. And be sure to read the first two posts if you haven't already: When the World Is Wired: The Magic of the Internet of Everything Where Artificial Intelligence Is Now and What's Just Around the Corner An expert might be reasonably good at predicting the growth of a single exponential technology (e.g., the Internet of Things), but try to predict the future when AI, robotics, VR, synthetic biology, and computation are all doubling, morphing and recombining… You have a very exciting (read: unpredictable) future. This year at my Abundance 360 Summit I decided to explore this concept in sessions I called Convergence Catalyzers.

Machines have already started their march towards artificial intelligence. Deep Learning and Neural Networks are probably the hottest topics in machine learning research today. Companies like Google, Facebook and Baidu are heavily investing into this field of research. Researchers believe that machine learning will highly influence human life in near future. Human tasks will be automated using robots with negligible margin of error. I'm sure many of us would never have imagined such gigantic power of machine learning.

This five-fingered robot hand can learn how to perform dexterous manipulation -- like spinning a tube full of coffee beans -- on its own, rather than having humans program its actions.University of Washington Robots today can perform space missions, solve a Rubik's cube, sort hospital medication and even make pancakes. But most can't manage the simple act of grasping a pencil and spinning it around to get a solid grip. Intricate tasks that require dexterous in-hand manipulation -- rolling, pivoting, bending, sensing friction and other things humans do effortlessly with our hands -- have proved notoriously difficult for robots. Now, a University of Washington team of computer scientists and engineers has built a robot hand that can not only perform dexterous manipulation but also learn from its own experience without needing humans to direct it. Their latest results are detailed in a paper to be presented May 17 at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

As a young researcher tasked with pioneering AI in my corporate research lab, this is an exciting opportunity. We are at the very peak of the AI hype curve. This is no ordinary academic conference. The Japanese had announced their 5th Generation computing project that promised fundamental logical processing. The USA responded with a 10 year research project CyC to give computers common sense reasoning power.

In March, a computer achieved what many thought impossible when it won a best of five series against world-class go champion Lee Sedol. The victory by the DeepMind computer was the most significant milestone in artificial intelligence (AI) since Deep Blue beat chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, and once again sparked many predictable headlines about humans being knocked off our IQ perch. The question is, what do such human versus computer matches tell us about AI? Is it the harbinger of a machine-led future or are computers just very good at playing board games? To see how this might play out, we first need to look to the past. Despite being extremely bad at playing board games as complicated as chess and go for decades, there was almost a sense of inevitability to computers eventually surpassing the abilities of their human creators in this area.

In a development that's likely to make you feel older than MySpace, what may be one of the watershed moments early in the era of the viral Internet has just passed it's 10-year anniversary, and the Twitterverse has been having fun remembering. It's now more than a decade since Congolese job hopeful Guy Goma found himself offering his not-so-expert analysis of a legal dispute between Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and Apple Corp, The Beatles' record label, over trademark rights. Goma, after arriving at the BBC's West London headquarters for an interview for a job in the IT department on May 8, 2006, was mistaken for a studio guest, British technology journalist Guy Kewney, and ushered all the way into a live BBC News 24 studio. Looking baffled and nervously eying the cameras, the wrong Guy proceeded to have a go at answering presenter Karen Bowerman's questions about the future of downloading. Ten years on, his answers seem actually quite prescient. "Actually, if you can go everywhere you're gonna see a lot of people downloading through Internet and the website, everything they want," he said, adding: "It is going to be an easy way for everyone to get something through the Internet."

Meet the Woman Who's Created the 21st Century Finance Model for Emerging Technologies Riva-Melissa Tez is the CEO and co-founder of Permutation in San Francisco. A London native, she runs an artificial intelligence platform and incubator. In her spare time, she works on The Longevity Cookbook, alongside Maria Konovalenko and Steve Aoki, which is a book that distills academic research into practical measures for slowing the aging process. This is an edited transcript of a recorded interview. I learned important lessons about money at a very early age. At 10, I moved into a homeless shelter after my father left my mother. My mother is severely schizophrenic -- which can be both chaotically fun and devastatingly traumatic -- and was not well enough to look after herself, let alone me at the time. Amongst other things, she used to make me drink the milk in the morning first to check if it had poison in it. A few years later, at 14, we moved into social housing.

Last week, the White House released a report chronicling the Obama administration's concerns over Big Data and artificial intelligence. Many prominent thinkers and scientists have come out recently with warnings about the dangers of unchecked artificial intelligence. However, the A.I. the White House report refers to is not of the Terminator ilk -- rather, Obama has concerns over algorithmic artificial intelligence operating without human oversight. The report, "Big Data: A Report on Algorithmic Systems, Opportunity, and Civil Rights," catalogs the growing sphere of influence represented by Big Data in society, including employment, higher education, and criminal justice. "As data-driven services become increasingly ubiquitous, and as we come to depend on them more and more, we must address concerns about intentional or implicit biases that may emerge from both the data and the algorithms used as well as the impact they may have on the user and society. Questions of transparency arise when companies, institutions, and organizations use algorithmic systems and automated processes to inform decisions that affect our lives, such as whether or not we qualify for credit or employment opportunities, or which financial, employment and housing advertisements we see." "If feedback loops are not thoughtfully constructed, a predictive algorithmic system built in this manner could perpetuate policing practices that are not sufficiently attuned to community needs and potentially impede efforts to improve community trust and safety. For example, machine learning systems that take into account past arrests could indicate that certain communities require more policing and oversight, when in fact the communities may be changing for the better over time."

The company is continuing its review of the potential to use drones someday in its global package delivery system, teaming with two partners to deliver blood supplies later this year in Rwanda. The company, through its UPS Foundation, has committed 800,000 toward the project with Zipline, a California robotics company; and Gavi, a Swiss-based group that works to bring vaccines to children in poor countries. UPS said that starting later this year, the Rwandan government intends to begin using Zipline drones to delivery blood to 21 transfusing facilities in the western half of the country. The goal is to step up the battle against the deaths of women who hemorrhage after giving birth. The additional blood can allow for life-saving transfusions on a continent known for the world's high rates of maternal death, according to the World Health Organization.