Many people find mathematics daunting. If true, this piece is for you. If not, this piece is still for you. What do you think of when you think about mathematics? Perhaps you think about x's and y's, intractable fractions, or nonsensical word problems.

To the inexperienced, hearing the words Artificial Intelligence (or AI) can make our ears turn off. It's hard to resist the urge – AI is a whole new language to most of us, one that has a stigma for being a real challenge to learn. CLWB.org has decided to help change this. Their upcoming event, Artificial Intelligence Demystified, aims to teach you the basics at the Engine Shed on 26 October. We caught up with Mike Lloyd, the Founder of CLWB, to find out more: "The objective of the event is to enable non-expert people to get on the front foot in terms of AI." Being able to manipulate the benefits AI presents is an invaluable skill and CLWB thinks its course could be the breakthrough point for you.

Creating noodling piano tunes and endless configurations of cat drawings with AI may not sound like an obvious project for Google, but it makes a lot of sense to Douglas Eck. Eck has spent about 15 years studying AI and music, and these days he's a research scientist on the Google Brain team, leading Magenta--Google's open-source research project that's aimed at making art and music with machine learning. He spoke to MIT Technology Review about how Google is producing new sounds with deep neural networks, where Magenta is taking AI music, and why computers suck at telling jokes. Below is an edited excerpt of the interview. Premium MIT Technology Review subscribers can listen to the full interview. Using AI to make art isn't new, so what's unique about Google's approach?

People get up to weird things in New Zealand. At the University of Auckland, if you want to run hours upon hours of experiments on a baby trapped in a high chair, that's cool. You can even have a conversation with her surprisingly chatty disembodied head. BabyX, the virtual creation of Mark Sagar and his researchers, looks impossibly real. The child, a 3D digital rendering based on images of Sagar's daughter at 18 months, has rosy cheeks, warm eyes, a full head of blond hair, and a soft, sweet voice. When I visited the computer scientist's lab last year, BabyX was stuck inside a computer but could still see me sitting in front of the screen with her "father." To get her attention, we'd call out, "Hi, baby. Look at me, baby," and wave our hands. When her gaze locked onto our faces, we'd hold up a book filled with words (such as "apple" or "ball") and pictures (sheep, clocks), then ask BabyX to read the words and identify the objects.

About a month ago, iRobot CEO Colin Angle mentioned something about sharing Roomba mapping data in an interview with Reuters. It got turned into a data privacy kerfuffle in a way that iRobot did not intend and (probably) did not deserve, as evidenced by their immediate clarification that iRobot will not sell your data or share it without your consent. Data privacy is important, of course, especially for devices that live in your home with you. But as robots get more capable, the amount of data that they collect will increase, and sharing that data in a useful, thoughtful, and considerate way could make smart homes way smarter. To understand how iRobot is going to make this happen, we spoke with Angle about keeping your data safe, integrating robots with the future smart home, and robots that can get you a beer.

If you are among the millions of Americans concerned about cybersecurity at the Democratic National Committee--and how could you not be?--then the home of the party's tech braintrust might not give you much hope. The tiny, charmless office, with "DNC Tech" scribbled in dry-erase marker on the door, contains one desk and two computer monitors. Nearby, an overturned couch pokes out from an elevator shaft, a leftover from the widespread departures that followed Hillary Clinton's defeat. And that, of course, came after intruders, believed to be tied to Russia, hacked into the DNC's computers. If the office itself seems lacking, the resume of its newish occupant is anything but.

If you believe everything you read, you are probably quite worried about the prospect of a superintelligent, killer AI. The Guardian, a British newspaper, warned recently that "we're like children playing with a bomb," and a recent Newsweek headline reads, "Artificial Intelligence Is Coming, and It Could Wipe Us Out." Numerous such headlines, fueled by comments from the likes of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, are strongly influenced by the work of one man: professor Nick Bostrom, author of the philosophical treatise Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, and Strategies. Bostrom is an Oxford philosopher, but quantitative assessment of risks is the province of actuarial science. He may be dubbed the world's first prominent "actuarial philosopher," though the term seems an oxymoron given that philosophy is an arena for conceptual arguments, and risk assessment is a data-driven statistical exercise. So what do the data say?

Jimoh Ovbiagele is the Chief Technology Officer & co-founder of ROSS Intelligence. He is a self-taught programmer, starting at the age of 10, who founded several startups in college and worked on self-driving cars. When he was 21, Jimoh came up with the idea for and co-founded ROSS Intelligence. Two years later, he was named by the American Bar Association as a Legal Rebel and by Forbes as one of their 30 Under 30. He speaks around the world -- from Canada to China -- about artificial intelligence and the future of law.

When Norman Borlaug, the father of the green revolution, won the Nobel Prize in 1970, the Nobel Committee remarked that "more than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world." Borlaug's introduction of disease resistant high-yielding crop varieties and advanced agricultural practices was a game changer, as agriculture yields increased tremendously and helped save millions from starvation. Half a century after Borlaug received the Nobel Prize, we live in a world where yield growth is plateauing and the total land under cultivation is decreasing. Changing weather patterns and water availability is altering productivity in certain agricultural regions. At the same time, world population continues to grow and is projected to reach at least 9 billion people by 2050, much of the growth is clustered in developing countries, where rapid economic expansion is allowing for increased calorie availability and consumption with an increased demand for protein.

Half a century after Borlaug received the Nobel Prize, we live in a world where yield growth is plateauing and the total land under cultivation is decreasing. Changing weather patterns and water availability is altering productivity in certain agricultural regions. At the same time, world population continues to grow and is projected to reach at least 9 billion people by 2050, much of the growth is clustered in developing countries, where rapid economic expansion is allowing for increased calorie availability and consumption with an increased demand for protein. As these two forces of population growth and demand for food gain momentum, is a risk of reaching a Malthusian doomsday--a scenario where population growth outpaces the growth in food supply resulting in large-scale famines--becoming increasingly likely? Preventing this may very well be one of the most important challenges of the 21st century.