Today, we create a staggering amount of information: formulas, tweets, poetry, photos, videos and many more. Even our discoveries and diagnosis generate data. Can we draw meaning from it? That let's do things we've never done before. Overcome obstacles that used to stop us.

The sandbox world of Minecraft allows you build practically anything. Soon though, it won't be used simply to create spatial objects, but artificial intelligence systems. At least, that's Microsoft's plan, taking an project aiming to teach AI to make its own decisions and launching it as an open-source testbed. Currently, Microsoft's internal study sees a small team of computer scientists trying to teach a virtual player how to navigate Mojang's blocky world. The AI has only the same available resources a flesh and blood player would have access to, and must learn from its mistakes.

Lee Sedol, the South Korean Go champion who lost to a computer earlier this month, has said he would like a rematch. Lee, a top-ranking Go player who has 18 international titles under his belt, lost a five-game match to AlphaGo, a computer program developed by British artificial intelligence company DeepMind. However, Lee is ready to take on the machine once again. Speaking to Yonhap News, he said: "I will have to consider it carefully, but if AlphaGo wants a rematch, I'd like to face it again, on the condition it will take place in the near future." He also hinted that he may have discovered the program's secrets, saying: "I figured out AlphaGo to some degree during our last meeting."

Andy Grove, the refu gee from Hungary who became one of the pillars of Silicon Valley and, as both scientist and executive, was a principal figure in the rise of the Intel Corp. and a symbol of the world-wide computer revolution, died Monday. The death was announced on the company's website. It did not give a cause or a location. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and Parkinson's disease. In a statement, Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich said that Mr. Grove "made the impossible happen, time and again, and inspired generations of technologists, entrepreneurs, and business leaders."

Machine learning is increasingly enabling companies to gain strategic advantage by turning big data into insightful and actionable information. But how do they access this new world of artificial intelligence? Offering easy access to machine learning, predictive APIs [application programming interfaces] are emerging as a key driving factor for machine learning (ML) and the overall world of artificial intelligence (AI). Predictive APIs offer the flexibility of deciding to host machine learning in the cloud, in-house or both, giving developers the freedom to work in the language and tools they want. "A predictive API exposes machine learning capability so it can either be an API that gives access to a predictive model, and it can also expose access to an ability to learn new models and to create new models from data," said Louis Dorard, who has a PhD in machine learning and is the author of Bootstrapping Machine Learning and is founder of the series of predictive API conferences, including PAPIs.io "There's machine learning APIs where you can send a data set -- for example, one column for the tweet and another column for positive or negative or neutral -- and then they send it back [through] the API and then you can reuse the model for data," Dorard said.

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Well, now I am just wondering how I've lived so long without a holographic butler. See also: Sorry, Tesla: The world's fastest electric car is made in... Croatia? Ignoring my deep disappointment of living sans digital manservant aside, the concept actually makes some sense. That's because Bentley imagines a future when elite drivers won't want simply speak commands to a faceless digital assistant à la Siri. Instead, they'll want to have a personalized experience when in their ultimate luxury machine.

Until now, medicine has been a prestigious and often extremely lucrative career choice. But with intelligent machines now used to diagnose diseases, in the near future, will we need as many doctors as we have now? Are we going to see significant medical unemployment in the coming decade? Dr Saxon Smith, president of the Australian Medical Association NSW branch, said in a report late last year that the most common concerns he hears from doctors-in-training and medical students are, "what is the future of medicine?" The answers, he said, continue to elude him.

What is the time lag from Science Fiction to reality? Arthur C. Clarke wrote about geostationary satellites in 1945 and it became reality 20 years later, but Clarke's work was more grounded in science than the Kubrick classic 2001 featuring the Hal AI computer. That was released in 1968 – 48 years ago. It is such an easy fiction trick to imagine a machine as smart as a human, but the reality of AI has been much harder. It is now getting a lot easier.

Geoffrey Hinton, an artificial intelligence (AI) expert who splits his time between Google and the University of Toronto, believes machines could match human abilities in "more than five years." Hinton, known as the godfather of "deep learning," said the most powerful machines are still about a million times smaller than the human brain. They only have the equivalent of around a billion synapses (the connections between the neurons in the brain), compared to 1,000 trillion in the human brain. But machines are becoming more sophisticated every year. When asked to predict how long it will take before machines possess human-level abilities, Hinton said: "More than five years. I refuse to say anything beyond five years because I don't think we can see much beyond five years."