Pablo Picasso once declared: "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." The Spanish artist's joke may have been true of the 20th century, when computers were for the most part souped-up calculating machines performing clearly prescribed functions. But the expansion of computing power in the early 21st century means that computers are now posing some of the most testing questions of our times. And it is not clear who is responsible for providing the answers.

In the late '90s, Tomi Poutanen, a precocious computer whiz from Finland, hoped to do his dissertation on neural networks, a scientific method aimed at teaching computers to act and think like humans. As a student at the University of Toronto, it was a logical choice. Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of neural network research, taught and ran a research lab there. But instead of encouraging Poutanen, who went on to work at Yahoo and recently co-founded media startup Milq, one of his professors sent a stern warning about taking the academic path known as deep learning. "Smart scientists," his professor cautioned, "go there to see their careers end."

The U.S. unveiled the prototype of an autonomous, experimental warship Thursday that would drastically reduce the cost of operations at sea and mark progress in the move toward robotic warfare. It comes as the military has increasingly aimed to boost unmanned technology to counter Chinese and Russian investments. "This is an inflection point," Deputy U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Work told Reuters in an interview. "This is the first time we've ever had a totally robotic, trans-oceanic-capable ship." Work said he hoped unmanned ships would be stationed in the western Pacific within as few as five years.

Nvidia's chief executive says its self-driving system will be installed in all the cars in the Roborace Formula E series, an all-robotic, all-electric variant of Formula One that's to begin by early next year. In a speech on Tuesday at the GPU Technology Conference, in San Jose, Calif., Jen-Hsun Huang said his company's Drive PX 2 system would be standard in all the cars that the 10 Roborace teams will manage. The hardware, which was unveiled in January at CES, can be held in one hand and can perform 24 trillion operations per second while wrangling data from a dozen cameras as well as radar sets and LIDAR. When the original developer's kit was released a year ago, Michael Houston, the technical lead for the project, told IEEE Spectrum that the system could accommodate knowledge gleaned from deep learning, a method that uses reiterative analysis to discover patterns in masses of data. "Deep learning has different applications," he said.

The US has officially christened its experimental self-driving warship designed to hunt for enemy submarines for months at a time. The 132ft-long (40-metre) unarmed prototype, dubbed Sea Hunter, is the naval equivalent of Google's self-driving car, designed to cruise on the ocean's surface without a crew. The ship's projected 20 million ( 14.2 million) price tag and its 15,000 ( 10,650) to 20,000 ( 14,300) daily operating cost make it relatively inexpensive for the navy. The 132ft-long (40-metre) unarmed prototype, dubbed Sea Hunter, is the naval equivalent of Google's self-driving car, designed to cruise on the ocean's surface without a crew. The ship's projected 20 million ( 14.2 million) price tag and its 20,000 ( 14,300) daily operating cost make it relatively inexpensive for the navy The vessel was unveiled by Deputy US Defense Secretary Robert Work and has been developed by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).

Mind Foundry has raised 1.2m in seed funding from private investors and investment company Oxford Sciences Innovation to commercialise the technology. The company's technology is based on advanced algorithms and techniques developed by Professors Stephen Roberts and Michael Osborne (pictured here), who lead Machine Learning research at Oxford's Department of Engineering Science. Mind Foundry will build on over 25 years of academic research and applied commercial consulting engagements within the Machine Learning Research Group, a specialist research team within Information Engineering at the University's Department of Engineering Science. Stephen Roberts commented: "We live in an era in which the success of organisations and advances in science and technology are increasingly reliant on the fast and accurate analysis of data. But driving these advances is a deluge of data which is outstripping the computational ability to process it, let alone act upon it. We live in an age of big data – but not necessarily big insight. Mind Foundry has the capability to turn this data into actionable insight."

In an age when technology companies routinely introduce new forms of everyday magic, one problem that remains seemingly unsolved is that of long-form transcription. Sure, voice dictation for documents has been conquered by Nuance's Dragon software. Our phones and smart home devices can understand fairly complex commands, thanks to self-teaching recurrent neural nets and other 21st century wonders. However, the task of providing accurate transcriptions of long blocks of actual human conversation remains beyond the abilities of even today's most advanced software. When solved on a broad scale, it is a problem that might unlock vast archives of oral histories, make podcasts easier to consume for speed-readers (tl;dl), and be a world-changing boon for journalists everywhere, liberating precious hours of sweet life.

In what they called a milestone achievement for artificial intelligence, scientists said on Wednesday they have created a computer program that beat a professional human player at the complex board game called Go, which originated in ancient China. The feat recalled IBM supercomputer Deep Blue's 1997 match victory over chess world champion Garry Kasparov. But Go, a strategy board game most popular in places like China, South Korea and Japan, is vastly more complicated than chess. "Go is considered to be the pinnacle of game AI research," said artificial intelligence researcher Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, the British company that developed the AlphaGo program. "It's been the grand challenge, or holy grail if you like, of AI since Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess."

We often get questions about whether to use Python or R – and we've come to a conclusion thanks to insight from our community of mentors and learners. Data science is the sexiest job of the 21st century. Data scientists around the world are presented with exciting problems to solve. Within the complex questions they have to ask, a growing mountain of data rests a set of insights that can change entire industries. In order to get there, data scientists often rely on programming languages and tools. Some of the biggest names in tech are coming to TNW Conference in Amsterdam this May.

More than half of the human race could be unemployed in 30 years time as job vacancies are filled by machines, a leading computer science has predicted. A life of leisure could be the norm for a majority of people in decades to come, according to Moshe Vardi from Rice University in Houston, Texas. 'We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task,' Professor Vardi told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). 'I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?' Last year, robots were ordered and shipped into North America at a record-breaking rate.