Last week was the high point of the Dota 2 competitive year: it was the week of The International, Valve's biggest tournament. On Saturday, Team Liquid walked away with more than $10 million after defeating Newbee 3-0 in the grand final. Right now, one of the requirements to be a good Dota 2 player is that you've got to be a living, breathing human. The game does include some basic computer-controlled bots to practice against, but any seasoned player of the game should have no trouble prevailing over these bots, even on their hardest "Unfair" difficulty (though the Unfair Viper bot is a legendary jerk that's utterly miserable to play against). Last Friday, however, we got a hint of a new, altogether more threatening kind of computer-controlled player: an AI-controlled bot built by Elon Musk's OpenAI.

There have been many kinds of books, with many kinds of meanings. This one book was special because it was the first fictional story produced via artificial intelligence. It was the first book in the sense that its contents made sense. Before this book, all other attempts of letting an AI write a book had produced things that were pastiches of randomness. A couples of sentences here and there surrounded by text that made no sense.

Born in 1925, Aldiss had a huge influence on sci-fi, as both a writer and an editor. His work includes "Greybeard," set in a world without young people, and the "Helliconia" trilogy, centered on a planet in which the seasons last for centuries.

Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRS[1][4] (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004) was a British molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist, most noted for being a co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953 with James Watson, work which was based partly on fundamental studies done by Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling and Maurice Wilkins. Together with Watson and Maurice Wilkins, he was jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".[3][6] Crick was an important theoretical molecular biologist and played a crucial role in research related to revealing the helical structure of DNA. He is widely known for use of the term "central dogma" to summarize the idea that genetic information flow in cells is essentially one-way, from DNA to RNA to protein.[7] During the remainder of his career, he held the post of J.W. Kieckhefer Distinguished Research Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. His later research centered on theoretical neurobiology and attempts to advance the scientific study of human consciousness. He remained in this post until his death; "he was editing a manuscript on his death bed, a scientist until the bitter end" according to Christof Koch.[8] Crick was the first son of Harry Crick (1887–1948) and Annie Elizabeth Crick (née Wilkins; 1879–1955). He was born and raised in Weston Favell, then a small village near the English town of Northampton, in which Crick's father and uncle ran the family's boot and shoe factory. His grandfather, Walter Drawbridge Crick (1857–1903), an amateur naturalist, wrote a survey of local foraminifera (single-celled protists with shells), corresponded with Charles Darwin,[9] and had two gastropods (snails or slugs) named after him. At an early age, Francis was attracted to science and what he could learn about it from books. As a child, he was taken to church by his parents. But by about age 12, he said he did not want to go anymore, as he preferred a scientific search for answers over religious belief.[10] Walter Crick, his uncle, lived in a small house on the south side of Abington Avenue; he had a shed at the bottom of his little garden where he taught Crick to blow glass, do chemical experiments and to make photographic prints. When he was eight or nine he transferred to the most junior form of the Northampton Grammar School, on the Billing Road.

This episode of Fast Forward was recorded in the IBM Watson Experience Center here in New York City. My guest was Rob High, the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of IBM Watson. High works across multiple teams within IBM, including engineering, development, and strategy. He is one of the most lucid thinkers in the space of artificial intelligence, and our conversation covered many of the way that technology is reshaping our jobs, our society and our lives. Read and watch our conversation below. Dan Costa: What is the dominant misconception that people have about artificial intelligence? Rob High: I think the most common problem that we're running into with people talking about AI is they still live in the world where I think Hollywood has amplified this idea that cognitive computing, AI, is about replicating the human mind, and it's really not. Things like the Turing test tend to reinforce that what we're measuring is the idea of AI being able to compete with fooling people into believing that what you're dealing with is another human being, but that's really not been where we have found the greatest utility. This even goes back to, if you look at almost every other tool that has ever been created, our tools tend to be most valuable when they're amplifying us, when they're extending our reach, when they're increasing our strength, when they're allowing us to do things that we can't do by ourselves as human beings. That's really the way that we need to be thinking about AI as well, and to the extent that we actually call it augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence.

Despite many advocates for artificial intelligence and automation playing down the long-term risk to employment levels, Indian tech giant Infosys has revealed its early adoption of the technology has already dramatically reduced the numbers of people it is hiring. In an exclusive interview with The Australian Financial Review, Infosys chief operating officer Pravin Rao said the deployment of artificial intelligence was instrumental in it cutting its annual hiring of new full-time staff by more than 10,000 in 2016-17. Mr Rao said the company hired 6000 full-time employees in 2016-17, down from 17,000 the previous year and had averaged numbers between 15,000 and 20,000 in the years since the global financial crisis. "Our industry's growth is down a bit too, hence the lower number, but we do think the big investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning we've made in the last two years means our number of new recruits will be below 10,000 a year from now on, at least for the foreseeable future" Mr Rao said.

Academia and industry at first glance appear to be strange bedfellows. One focuses on the theoretical and conceptual, whilst the other is driven by the practicalities of deadlines, goals and ultimately, profit. I have worked on AI in both of these roles, and throughout my 20 year career I've come to the realisation that, when it comes to driving innovation, these two distinct spheres need to work together. AI promises to be the most important technology of the future, and if the lofty ambitions and out-of-the-box thinking of academia can find synergy with the can-do attitude, urgency and resources of industry, we'll see an explosion in its applications. In fact, I believe that AI and ML technology won't just be a nice feature but will be a requirement for all applications go forward. This collaboration between industry and academia has been growing for some time and, like most things in technology, it all boils down to the data.

Andrew Ng is one of the foremost thinkers on the topic of artificial intelligence. He founded and led the "Google Brain" project which developed massive-scale deep learning algorithms. In 2011, he led the development of Stanford University's main Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform. His course on Machine Learning would eventually reach an "enrollment" of over 100,000 students. That experience led Ng to co-found Coursera, a MOOC that partners with some of the top universities in the world to offer high quality online courses. Today, Coursera is the largest MOOC platform in the world.

Machine learning already plays a big part in your everyday life, and its role is only going to grow. Google searches and muttered requests to Amazon's Alexa may tap into a veiled world of clever algorithms, but these techniques teeter on something much larger: a world of self-developing artificial intelligence. Deep learning, and the neural networks that do the thinking, is becoming an integral seam to digital technology. By extension, artificial intelligence is having a growing effect on our experience of the world and, as an artist, it is a material that can't be ignored. That at least is the thinking of Anna Ridler, who is building a name for herself with works that hoist machine-learning techniques and bring them into the gallery.

The Hugo Awards, widely considered the most prestigious science fiction and fantasy prizes, were announced Friday, with female authors dominating and N.K. Jemisin winning the award for novel for the second year in a row. Jemisin, who became the first black author to win the Hugo's novel award last year (for "The Fifth Season"), won again with the book's sequel, "The Obelisk Gate." The third and final book in Jemisin's trilogy, "The Stone Sky," will be released Tuesday. The awards were announced at a ceremony at Worldcon 75, a science fiction festival held this year in Helsinki, Finland. Female authors also took home the awards for novella ("Every Heart a Doorway" by Seanan McGuire), novelette ("The Tomato Thief" by Ursula Vernon) and short story ("Seasons of Glass and Iron" by Amal El-Mohtar).