Siri, Alexa, Google Home--technology that parses language is increasingly finding its way into everyday life. Boris Katz, a principal research scientist at MIT, isn't that impressed. Over the past 40 years, Katz has made key contributions to the linguistic abilities of machines. In the 1980s, he developed START, a system capable of responding to naturally phrased queries. The ideas used in START helped IBM's Watson win on Jeopardy!

If, by some chance, you find yourself in Mark Cuban's bathroom, make sure to check out the reading materials. "If you go in my bathroom, there's a book, Machine Learning for Idiots," Cuban said on the latest episode of Recode Media. "Whenever I get a break, I'm reading it." That means everyone, including and especially business owners, are at risk if they don't educate themselves now. "There'll be a time when people take AI and its impact for granted, but if you don't know how to use it and you don't understand it and you can't at least at have a basic understanding of the different approaches and how the algorithms work, you can be blindsided in ways you couldn't even possibly imagine," Cuban said. "Algorithms are a function, literally, of the people who write them. Whoever they are, whatever they are, that's what you're going to get," he added. "If you don't know any better, it's like if you just had somebody who wrote software and didn't know anything about your business. There's going to be all kinds of risks involved. You have to understand it." You can listen to Recode Media wherever you get your podcasts -- including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Overcast. Below, we've shared a lightly edited full transcript of Peter's conversation with Mark, recorded live at Vox Media's The Deep End at South by Southwest 2019. I do a lot of these interviews now, either on a stage like this or at our own conferences or podcasts, and the thing I've learned over years is the best guest you can ever have is a billionaire who owns his or her own company because they can say whatever they want. So that's what we set up for you today. You answer your own emails. You know, I'm talented like that. Thank you for doing that. I'm not going to ask you if you are running for president. Because that's a boring ... I'm gonna get a boring answer. If you did run for president, like everyone else at South By Southwest, what would you campaign on? You put me on the spot. Let's just start by what I think is important, right, and I'm not a candidate so I don't give a shit if you like it or don't like it. First is common sense, right? Second is trying to bring people together.

Facebook is developing technology that could soon make it possible to read your mind. CEO Mark Zuckerberg detailed how the Silicon Valley giant is researching a'brain-computer interface' in an interview with Harvard law school professor Jonathan Zittrain, according to Wired. In the near future, this system would allow users to interact with augmented reality environments using just their brain - no keyboards, touchscreens or hand gestures required. Facebook is developing technology that could soon make it possible to read your mind. CEO Mark Zuckerberg detailed how the firm is researching a'brain-computer interface' The concept that Zuckerberg envisions would allow users to navigate menus, move objects in an AR room or even type words with their brain.

Dr. Topol believes that A.I. can do more than enhance diagnoses and treatments. It can also save doctors from doing tasks like taking notes and reading scans, allowing them to spend more time connecting with their patients. Recently, we caught up with Dr. Topol to discuss his thoughts on where A.I. has the most potential to improve health care, where it might stumble, and how it could protect doctors from things like burnout and depression. Here are edited excerpts from our interview. Q. Can A.I. help to lower America's soaring health care costs?

Writing is the foundation of communication. Not too long ago, we hand-wrote messages to friends, wrote our homework for school, our to-do lists on paper and announced our personal news the same way. Though we may not use a pen or paper as we once did, we communicate today by typing, be it messages to friends, posts on social media, preparing a PowerPoint presentation, messaging on our phones or laptops. Written communication remains a huge part of our everyday life. How we communicate in writing has evolved.

"I hear a lot that algorithms are powerful technologies, and the companies are monopolies, and we are helpless against them, and Google is the only option," says Kartik Hosanagar, a professor of technology and digital business at the University of Pennsylvania. "I'm trying to say that we aren't." Hosanagar is the author of A Human's Guide to Machine Intelligence: How Algorithms Are Shaping Our Lives and How We Can Stay in Control, which comes out March 12th from Penguin Random House. The book takes the reader through all of the ways that daily lives are touched by algorithms. The Verge spoke to Hosanagar about the last part of the book: four suggestions, or "pillars," to implement to prevent harmful, unanticipated consequences.

Sella Nevo, a software engineer who specializes in machine learning (ML) research and development, currently leads the Google Flood Forecasting Initiative that aims to provide flood forecasts and warnings in developing countries. He was also one of the co-creators of the ML model used in Google Duplex. In a phone interview from Israel, Nevo--a keynote speaker at the Mint Digital Innovation Summit explains why Google chose Patna in India as a pilot for his project, and how the company plans to scale up this model not only in India but globally too. This Flood Forecasting Initiative is Google's effort to provide high accuracy, high resolution flood forecasting. It's not global yet, and our focus is in using the Google's machine learning (ML) expertise and our computational power as well as our access to various types of resources and data to substantially improve flood forecasting systems, their accuracy, their lead time and so on.

It's International Women's Day, a day to celebrate the achievements of women around the world and throughout history. But the day is also about recognizing the hardships women face, and the continued urgency of the fight for gender equality. That is true of WIRED's world, too--the world of technology and science, of media and innovation. Though this magazine was co-founded by a woman, and women have been key figures in every part of scientific and technological progress, men's narratives still dominate. Men still hold more STEM jobs.

In 2011, a friend of mine in college asked me if I'd read The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt's aim was to probe and distill--and "savor"--the moral precepts of antiquity in the light of modern science. The 2006 book was an answer to an overabundance of too-little-appreciated advice. "We might have already encountered the Greatest Idea, the insight that would have transformed us had we savored it, taken it to heart, and worked it into our lives," Haidt wrote." My friend was happy to encounter it: Haidt helped him through a difficult breakup. I hadn't heard of the book, but I had heard of its author. A paper of Haidt's, "The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment," had been assigned in my moral psychology course, and I was in the middle of writing an essay that argued against its conclusion. Haidt wrote that reason, compared to emotion, typically matters little to what we believe is ...

The next time you apply for a job, there's a very good chance that the first person you talk to won't be a person at all. A growing number of companies are using artificial intelligence (AI) not just to scan resumes and schedule interviews, but to conduct actual job interviews too. While it sounds like something you would expect from a Silicon Valley start-up, a third of respondents to a 2017 Deloitte survey said they already used some form of AI in their hiring process. Urban Outfitters, Under Armour, HBO, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, and even the Boston Red Sox have used AI-fueled interviews like those created by Montage and HireVue to recruit, screen, and help job seekers move through the hiring process. The practice is growing, too.