At a Buddhist temple northwest of Beijing, a humble machine has some advise for you. Xian'er, which translates into Worthy Stupid Robot Monk ("stupid," being a a term of affection in the local dialect), uses a touchpad to respond to questions or statements from visitors, reports the NY Times. If you ask, "What is the meaning of life?" the little orange-robed fellow will respond, "My master says the meaning of life is to help more people finally leave behind bitterness and gain happiness." If you say, "I'm not happy," he'll say, "If you're not happy, what can anyone else do about it?" Xian'er was developed last year as part of a collaboration between a dozen Chinese technology, culture and investment companies. The robot is based on a comic book character created by artists at the Comic Center inside the temple.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Google CEO Sundar Pichai says the next big evolution for technology is artificial intelligence. "Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the'device' to fade away," Pichai wrote in the technology giant's annual founders' letter to shareholders. His vision: Over time, computers, whatever shape they take, a mobile device in your hand or a mini computer on your wrist, "will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day." Google is far from alone. Artificial intelligence in which Google was a pioneer, is an increasingly crowded field.

Metz goes on, "The last-minute offers--some made at the conference itself--were large enough to force Musk and Altman to delay the announcement of the new startup. 'The amount of money was borderline crazy,' says Wojciech Zaremba, a researcher who was joining OpenAI after internships at both Google and Facebook and was among those who received big offers at the eleventh hour. How many dollars is'borderline crazy'? Two years ago, as the market for the latest machine learning technology really started to heat up, Microsoft Research vice president Peter Lee said that the cost of a top AI researcher had eclipsed the cost of a top quarterback prospect in the National Football League--and he meant under regular circumstances, not when two of the most famous entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley were trying to poach your top talent. Zaremba says that as OpenAI was coming together, he was offered two or three times his market value."

Shares in legendary Italian carmaker Ferrari are scheduled to begin trading 21 October on the New York Stock Exchange in an initial public offering (IPO) that could raise nearly 900 million dollars. Ferrari plans to offer 17.2 million shares. Their price will be 52 dollars (46 euros), Fiat Chrysler (FCA) confirmed 21 October. This is at the top end of the predicted price range of between 48 and 52 dollars. SAN FRANCISCO - Google's autonomous car execs have made no secret of their interest in finding a partner in the automotive manufacturing world for their technology.

DEVELOPING: A contractor who threatened to set off a bomb at the headquarters of Fox 45 Baltimore Thursday afternoon, forcing police to evacuate the building, walked outside before a sniper shot him as cameras rolled. The suspect, a man in his 20s, was still alive but refused to cooperate with officers, police spokesman T.J. Smith said. Reporters said they saw him kick off some of his clothing. When he walked out of the building, he was wearing a white panda suit, a surgical mask and sunglasses. Robot trying to get suspect to show his hands.

The sea has been called the final frontier, as its unexplored depths hold mysteries that humans have not been able to reach – until now. Dubbed'robo-mermaid', OceanOne is a humanoid outfitted with human vision, force feedback and artificial brain that can dive hundreds of feet deeper than any human ever has. And the maiden voyage of this droid proved bountiful as it pulled treasure from the'La Lune', King Louis XIV's vessel which has been sitting 328 feet below the surface since 1664. Dubbed'robo-mermaid', OceanOne is a humanoid outfitted with human vision, force feedback and artificial brain that can dive hundreds of feet deeper than any human ever has. Dubbed'robo-mermaid', OceanOne is a humanoid outfitted with human vision, force feedback and artificial brain that can dive hundreds of miles deeper than any human ever has Louis XIV's ship La Lune was wrecked off Toulon in November 1664.

This gif shows a spinning 3D view of one person's cerebral cortex. The color of each voxel indicates its semantic selectivity, or which category of words it is selective for. For example, green voxels are mostly selective for visual and tactile concepts, while red voxels are mostly selective social concepts. White lines show the outlines of known functional brain regions. It's like Google Maps for your cerebral cortex: A new interactive atlas, developed with the help of such unlikely tools as public radio podcasts and Wikipedia, purports to show which bits of your brain help you understand which types of concepts.

Scientists at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA have developed a new technique for identifying cancer cells in blood samples faster and more accurately than the current standard methods. In one common approach to testing for cancer, doctors add biochemicals to blood samples. Those biochemicals attach biological "labels" to the cancer cells, and those labels enable instruments to detect and identify them. However, the biochemicals can damage the cells and render the samples unusable for future analyses. There are other current techniques that don't use labeling but can be inaccurate because they identify cancer cells based only on one physical characteristic. The new technique images cells without destroying them and can identify 16 physical characteristics -- including size, granularity and biomass -- instead of just one.

'According to the American Trucking Association, there are some 3.5 million truck drivers in the United States alone. That's 3.5 million people who may lose their jobs once driverless trucks hit the roads in full force… which appears to be in the not-too-distant future. Tech Crunch reports that a convoy of these trucks recently drove across Europe and arrived without incident at their destination at the Port of Rotterdam for 75% cheaper than it would have cost had human beings been driving them:'

On yesterday's investor call, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked how the machine learning technology behind its recent introduction of bots to Messenger would manifest itself in the future. "So the biggest thing that we're focused on with artificial intelligence is building computer services that have better perception than people," he replied. "So the basic human senses like seeing, hearing, language, core things that we do. I think it's possible to get to the point in the next five to 10 years where we have computer systems that are better than people at each of those things." There are a couple of striking things about this statement: it imagines computer systems with abilities that are central to our existence as biological creatures, the essential skills that we rely on to understand and interact with the world.