Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek. One of humanity's greatest talents is its ability to self-destruct. In Silicon Valley, it's compulsory to call it disruption. You surely know that soon the world will be presided over by robots. They will think for us.

William Hertling is the author of Avogadro Corp, A.I. Apocalypse, The Last Firewall, The Turing Exception, and the upcoming Kill Process. These near-term science-fiction novels explore the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), the coexistence of humans and smart machines, and the impact of social reputation, technological unemployment, and other near-future issues. His novels have been called "frighteningly plausible," "tremendous," and "must-read." Hertling's Singularity Series novels have been endorsed by and received wide attention from tech luminaries including Harper Reed (CTO for the Obama Campaign), Ben Huh (CEO Cheezburger), and Chris Anderson (CEO 3DRobotics, former Editor-in-Chief Wired). His first novel for children, The Case of the Wilted Broccoli, was published in 2014. Hertling grew up a digital native in the early days of bulletin board systems. His first experiences with net culture occurred when he wired seven phone lines into the back of his Apple IIe and hosted an online chat system. A frequent speaker on the future of technology, science fiction, and indie publishing, Hertling has spoken at SXSW Interactive, Defrag, OryCon, University of Colorado, Willamette Writers Conference, and many other conferences. Did you start off wanting to become a writer, or did you stumble into it? WH: I very much stumbled into it, although, in retrospect, there were a few hints ahead of time.

Microsoft made headlines when Tay, the chatbot designed to engage with millennials, was exploited and began tweeting what the company described as "wildly inappropriate and reprehensible words and images." But other companies are quietly implementing similar artificial intelligence technology to interact with current and future customers. Atom Bank, a startup, mobile-only bank based in the U.K. recently announced that it is incorporating WDS Virtual Agent software from Xerox into its mobile app. The machine learning software will give customers an agent-like option for assisted self-service on the app. The software was introduced two year ago to diagnose and solve customer queries by analyzing data and learning from the ways in which human agents diagnosed and solved customer problems.

The AI is part of the social network's alternative text project (alt text for short) and will be used to add captions to any photos posted on News Feeds. Facebook counts 39 million blind and 246 million visually impaired users who, if they are using iOS with a screen reader, will hear a list of items a photograph may contain as they swipe past them, the company announced in a blog post. Previously they would hear the word'photo' but not be receive a description of it. The team behind the code have been working on it for more than ten months. A computer vision platform allows a visual recognition engine to scan images and understand what is in them, from objects to scenes and even specific places.

The world's first unmanned ship set sail on April 7. The new ship, called the Sea Hunter, will hunt enemy submarines lurking in the deep. A new hunter is lurking in the deep -- and it's made of metal, silicon, and lots and lots of artificial intelligence. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) officially launched its unmanned submarine-hunting ship, holding a christening ceremony on Thursday (April 7) for the "Sea Hunter." The new vessel is part of DARPA's larger initiative to use artificial intelligence (AI) for a wider array of military decisions and tasks.

People often ask me about the impact of 3D printing on jobs. Will the technology be a job creator or destroyer? The short answer is, it will take more jobs than it makes -- and 3D printing is not alone. Technology will eventually make work obsolete. Our big problems are going to be figuring out how to survive the transition, then figuring out what to do with all that free time. About 10 years ago, inventor, futurist and now Director of Engineering at Google Ray Kurzweil famously embraced the concept of "the singularity" -- that moment in time when machine intelligence surpasses our own. Kurzweil predicted the singularity would occur by 2045, and man and machine would become inseparable.

Do you know what is common between San Bernardino's shooting spree and the terrorist attacks in Paris last month? Jillennials, Jihadis who are Millennials. We mine data worldwide, a lot of it, a ton of it, every day and every night, and we do this for a living at PredictifyMe. We have partnership with the United Nations to protect school-goers in Pakistan, Nigeria, Sudan and Lebanon using our proprietary software SecureSim and Soothsayer . When the Paris attacks unfolded, we asked ourselves (and our database), how can we use data sciences to prevent something like this from ever happening again. Can we find out what factors influence an otherwise ordinary citizen to become radicalized?

Although Rembrandt died in 1669, his artistic legacy lives on in the shape of an ambitious high-tech painting project. Unveiled in Amsterdam Tuesday "The Next Rembrandt" was crafted by an unlikely duo: technology and algorithms that were able to study, mimic, and then create a 3D printed painting based on the famous artist's work. The painting carefully mimics Rembrandt van Rijn's style. The team behind the painting undertook an 18-month evaluation and analysis of Rembrandt's entire body of work (346 paintings) using high-resolution 3D scans and digital files. After the team determined that a majority of his work consists of portraits, the image of a "Caucasian male between the age of thirty and forty, with facial hair, wearing black clothes with a white collar and a hat, facing to the right" was determined to be the proper subject using a demographic segmentation of the people in the portraits.

In this special guest feature, Dave O'Flanagan, CEO and co-founder of Boxever, outlines how airlines are leveraging big data and predictive capabilities to transform how they engage with customers. Dave is the CEO and co-founder of Boxever, a data science and omni-channel personalization platform for travel companies. At Boxever, Dave's focus is enabling airlines and travel providers to improve the customer experience, generate revenue and enhance loyalty through one-to-one, personalized marketing. Dave has more than 15 years' experience developing and managing enterprise software in mobile telecoms, travel and cloud. Earlier he was VP of engineering at CUSP, a cloud-based document management startup and was a lead architect at CAPE Technologies.

The latest buzz about Panama Papers has shaken the world. As we all know the Panama Papers is a set of 2.6 TB of data that includes 11.5 million confidential documents with detailed information about more than 214,000 offshore companies listed by the Panamanian corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca. The Panama Papers has set an excellent example for the world about the importance of data science when it comes to analyzing big data. This leak makes us realize that appropriate approaches are needed to handle the challenges of data management for the present and the future. Let's take a deep dive into the Panama Papers and dig down the secret behind the biggest leak ever This leak contains 4.8 million emails, 3 million database entries, 21.5 million PDFs, around one million images and 320,000 text documents.