This week, we caught up with Sean Culey, Author of "Transition Point: From Steam to Singularity" and Keynote Speaker on Thriving in the Digital Age: The Need for a Copernican Business Revolution at the upcoming Internet of Manufacturing UK event, taking place in Farnborough, May 14-15. Sean is a global keynote speaker on the topic of disruptive technologies and their impact on supply chains, businesses, the economy and society. He is the author of'Transition Point', a detailed look at the causes of technological disruption and the impact it has on our society, and how the current wave of technological change will completely disrupt our business models, economy and society at large. Sean is also the author of numerous articles published in magazines such as Forbes and The European Business Review. What are the key technologies that you believe will transform industry over the next 5 years?

You might think that anthropology and AI is an odd pairing. But in a 2017 article in WIRED, journalist James Temperton wrote, "For DeepMind to realise its ambition of cracking general intelligence, it needs an interdisciplinary approach to AI". As DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman explained in the same article, "We need to have in-house the very best anthropologists, sociologists…specialists on bias and discrimination in machine learning systems, working with both our researchers and applied software development teams so that they can give them feedback and guidance and introduce them to new modes of critical thinking". So in the spirit of cross-disciplinary collaboration, around 300 technologists working in AI (machine learning, data science, robotics, AI) and anthropologists and sociologists from around the world will come together at the Watershed on Bristol's historic harbourside to discuss human-centred AI. One of the keynotes, Dr Julien Cornebise, is from Element AI.

Ahead of the much-anticipated IS Auto Asia 2019 this September, we spoke to speak Mahabir Gupta, Solutions & Products Consultant - IoT, Mobility & Data Security at Volvo, to discuss the opportunities and challenges with using artificial intelligence in the automotive industry. Your presentation is on'Artificial intelligence: boon or bane in the automotive industry', what can we expect to learn from your talk? The possibility of creating a thinking machine raises a host of opportunities and ethical issues. These questions relate both to ensuring that such machines do not harm humans and provide value to society. The presentation explores the opportunity of AI and the problem of creating AI more intelligent than humans, and ensuring that they use their advanced technology for good rather than ill.

Check out part one of this series for what the next five to fifteen years looks like in AI. In part two we get super sci-fi and see if our crystal ball can reach 50 years into the future. Once dumb objects have woken up. Your shirt is babbling away with your shades and having a conversation with your girlfriend's pearl earrings when she's traveling to give a talk in Brazil. Everything from our houses, to weapons, to planes, trains and automobiles, to roads, clothes, jewelry, headphones, glasses, and eye contacts are wild with thoughts. The dynamic new algorithms that pushed us past deep learning and powered the fourth wave of the intelligence revolution sprang from world wide efforts to map every single neuron and connection in the human brain. Eventually the processors and biotechnology caught up with our ambitions and scientists succeeded beyond our wildest expectations.

'Mortal Kombat 11,' the latest installment in the best-selling fighting game franchise, adds deeper customization options, along with a new story, modes, and improved graphics. If you are a fan of fighting video games, by now you're likely well aware of – or have already purchased – the eleventh main installment in the Mortal Kombat game franchise. That game, "Mortal Kombat 11" ($59; rated Mature for ages 17-up), developed by NetherRealm Studios and published by Warner Bros. Entertainment, is out now for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC. You likely know all about the improved graphics of this fighting game (running on Unreal Engine 3), its expanded story – a sequel to 2015's "Mortal Kombat X" – and new custom character variation system that lets you customize your fighter's look, gear, special abilities, taunts, finishing moves, and more. More: Razer built its business on video game hardware.

Australian bioethicist Julian Savulescu has a knack for provocation. He says most of us would readily accept it if it benefited us. As for eugenics--creating smarter, stronger, more beautiful babies--he believes we have an ethical obligation to use advanced technology to select the best possible children. A protégé of the philosopher Peter Singer, Savulescu is a prominent moral philosopher at the University of Oxford, where he directs the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. He sees nothing wrong with doping to help cyclists climb those steep mountains in the Tour de France. Some elite athletes will always cheat to boost their performance, so instead of trying to enforce rules that will be broken, he claims we'd be better off with a system that allows low-dose doping. So does Savulescu just get off being outrageous? "I actually think of myself as the voice of common sense," he says, though he admits to receiving his share of hate mail.

In the last year, new models and methods for pretraining and transfer learning have driven striking performance improvements across a range of language understanding tasks. The GLUE benchmark, introduced one year ago, offers a single-number metric that summarizes progress on a diverse set of such tasks, but performance on the benchmark has recently come close to the level of non-expert humans, suggesting limited headroom for further research. This paper recaps lessons learned from the GLUE benchmark and presents SuperGLUE, a new benchmark styled after GLUE with a new set of more difficult language understanding tasks, improved resources, and a new public leaderboard. SuperGLUE will be available soon at super.gluebenchmark.com.

Aidan O'Sullivan, the Head of Energy and Artificial Intelligence Research at University College London, will be presenting this year's international keynote at Australian Energy Week 2019. We caught up with Aidan ahead of the event to learn about the role AI will potentially be playing in the energy markets of the future. For background to our readers, would you be able to provide us with a brief overview of your projects and area of research? My research focuses on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning methods in the energy sector to promote efficiency and decarbonisation. This can be the use of AI at the individual customer level where I have projects with Energy Suppliers looking to estimate the uncertainty around customer consumption, or how best to engage with them through intelligent apps to encourage energy savings.

This week, I interviewed Yuval Noah Harari, the author of three best-selling books about the history and future of our species, and Fei-Fei Li, one of the pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence. The event was hosted by the Stanford Center for Ethics and Society, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and the Stanford Humanities Center. A transcript of the event follows, and a video is posted below. Nicholas Thompson: Thank you, Stanford, for inviting us all here. I want this conversation to have three parts: First, lay out where we are; then talk about some of the choices we have to make now; and last, talk about some advice for all the wonderful people in the hall. Yuval, the last time we talked, you said many, many brilliant things, but one that stuck out was a line where you said, "We are not just in a technological crisis. We are in a philosophical crisis." So explain what you meant and explain how it ties to AI. Let's get going with a note of ...

Neural networks are changing the way that Lex Flagel studies DNA. Lex's recent paper – The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Convolutional Neural Networks in Population Genetic Inference – demonstrates how simple deep learning techniques can be used to tackle the ever-changing field of DNA research. Lex is the Quantitative Genetics Team Lead at Bayer Crop Science. At Bayer, Lex focuses on genetics, genomics, bioinformatics, and data science on crops like corn and soybeans. Don't worry -- we'll dig into what all those terms mean! Lex has a PhD in Genetics from Iowa State University. I'm excited to share my conversation with Lex for this Humans of Machine Learning (#humansofml) interview. In this post, we're going to learn about how Lex uses deep learning to study population genetics, as well as Lex's own journey with data science and AI.