Judea Pearl, a winner of the Turing Award (the "Nobel Prize of computing"), has argued that, "All the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting." Finding patterns in data may be useful but it is not real intelligence. A recent New York Times article, "Can a Computer Devise a Theory of Everything?" suggested that Pearl is wrong because computer algorithms have moved beyond mere curve fitting. Stephen Hawking's 1980 prediction that, "The end might not be in sight for theoretical physics, but it might be in sight for theoretical physicists" was quoted. If computers can now devise theories that make theoretical physicists redundant, then they are surely smarter than the rest of us.

Dear Prudence is online weekly to chat live with readers. Here's an edited transcript of this week's chat. In just a few weeks, the days will start getting longer. Let's just hold on until then. Not my type: My older co-worker has a "puppy crush" on me. This is encouraged by our office matriarchs. The sexual desire on my part is nil.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is evolving at an exponential rate. Today, it has expanded beyond tech and geographical constraints and is slowly bringing massive changes worldwide. In recent times, AI influencers are driving conversations about AI news and trends across social media and beyond while also offering advice to numerous enterprises. Plus, they also help us keep updated with the recent innovations and information about AI. Analytics Insight brings 10 LinkedIn influencers who share the latest trends in the AI domain through insightful articles on their LinkedIn blogs.

Fifteen UK researchers have been awarded the Fellowships, named after AI pioneer Alan Turing, supported by a £20million government investment. As a result of the government investment, Fellows will work with academia and industry to help elevate their world-class research and transfer their innovations from the lab to the real world. These innovations have the potential to change how people live, work and communicate, helping to place the UK at the forefront of the AI and data revolution. Dr Hernandez Lobato's research focus will be on'Machine Learning for Molecular Design'. Many existing challenges, from personalised health care to energy production and storage, require the design and manufacture of new molecules.

In an interview with Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, Elon Musk revealed his thoughts on self-driving cars, oversight of artificial intelligence, and reasons behind his quest to be buried on Mars. Musk, who had announced in October Tesla's release of a beta version of its long-awaited "full self-driving" software, clarified that he is "definitely not trying to take anyone's steering wheel away from them." "I'm just saying what will most likely occur, and I am certain about this, is that self-driving will become much safer than a human driver. Probably by a factor of 10," he told Döpfner, adding that the bar for whether a person will be able to drive or not will be much more "stringent" in the future when autonomous driving is "10 times safer." But as Business Insider's Graham Rapier reported, the top US safety regulator, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, has repeated that "no vehicle available for purchase today is capable of driving itself." "The most advanced vehicle technologies available for purchase today provide driver assistance and require a fully attentive human driver at all times performing the driving task and monitoring the surrounding environment. Abusing these technologies is, at a minimum, distracted driving. Every State in the Nation holds the driver responsible for the safe operation of the vehicle," the agency said.

Katharina Volz is applying machine learning to finding and developing cures for brain-aging diseases, one of science's biggest conundrums. Born in Ulm, Germany (the birthplace of fellow scientist Albert Einstein), Volz was the first-ever Ph.D. in stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at Stanford University. Entrepreneurship did not come easily to Volz, a trained scientist. But a dogged passion for unearthing a cure for brain-aging disease is what pushed her to persevere. As the founder and CEO of OccamzRazor, a biotechnology firm, she's set out to treat a disease that hit close to home.

Gebru, an alumni of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, is one of the leading voices in the ethical use of artificial intelligence. She is well-known for her work on a landmark study in 2018 that showed how facial recognition software misidentified dark-skinned women as much as 35% of the time, whereas the technology worked with near precision on white men. She has also been an outspoken critic of the lack of diversity and unequal treatment of Black workers at tech companies, particularly at Alphabet Inc.'s Google, and said she believed her dismissal was meant to send a message to the rest of Google's employees not to speak up. Platformer received the email Gebru sent; she herself did not have access to her account after Google terminated her. It is published in full below.

The UK government recently published a review of algorithmic bias – an important and even crucial subject as ever more decision-making progresses from wetware to silicon. However, it would have been useful if they'd understood what Gary Becker told us all about discrimination itself – work for which he won the Nobel prize for economics. Almost all the things they are worrying about solve themselves within his logical structure. First though, a linguistic structure – let's examine the difference between algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI). An algo doesn't have to be encoded at all, it's a set of rules by which to make a decision – usually, almost always, derived from the current methods by which we make such decisions, just formalised or even coded.

Yang Liu, an Alexa AI principal scientist, and Ruhi Sarikaya, director of applied science, Alexa AI, have recently been named IEEE Fellows. The designation takes effect January 1, 2021. Liu is being honored for her "contributions to speech understanding and language-learning technology", while Sarikaya is being recognized for his "leadership in spoken language processing, and conversational understanding systems". Both currently lead research initiatives focused on making Alexa more natural and conversational, perceptive and context aware, and capable of self learning. The IEEE Fellow designation is conferred by the IEEE board of directors upon individuals with outstanding records of accomplishment in any of the IEEE fields of interest.

A 15-year-old scientist and inventor has been named as Time magazine's first "kid of the year". Gitanjali Rao, from Denver, Colorado, has invented new technologies across a range of fields, including a device that can identify lead in drinking water, and an app and Chrome extension that uses artificial intelligence to detect cyberbullying. She said she hoped she could inspire others to dream up ideas to "solve the world's problems". Gitanjali was chosen from a field of 5,000 US-based nominees, which was whittled down to five finalists by a committee of young people alongside comedian and TV presenter Trevor Noah. She and the other four finalists will be honoured in a TV special next Friday.