The world is going to change more over the next five years than it has over the last fifteen. That, at least, is the opinion of Jeremy Waites, who describes himself as just a lowly storyteller, traveling around to telling tales about cool stuff. Officially that makes him an evangelist, and the'cool stuff' on which he evangelises is IBM's AI system, Watson. I met up with him at the recent Cloud Expo in London to discuss some of the wider issues about where AI fits in the business and wider world, what it can bring to those parties, and what impact it might have on the way work changes – or indeed continues to exist. Like a growing number of people in the AI business Waites is keen to stress that the'A' does not stand for'Artificial', but rather for'Augmented', on the basis that the former carries with it all those scary, sci-fi connotations.

How to Cut Cake Fairly.

Do you think you can read emotions like joy or anger in another person's face and actions? Read them because joy and anger are universal emotions and we all know what they look and feel like? Well, if so, says neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, you are winging it, guessing at best. Emotions like happiness and despair are not baked into our brains, waiting to be triggered by experiences in the world. Sure, we have a range of feelings, stimulated by our senses. But those feelings cannot be categorized as emotions innate in everyone. What we call emotions, Barrett says, are concepts constructed by our individual neural systems, molded by our cultures and past experiences. In her new and first book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, based on years of research at her neuroscience lab at Northeastern University, Barrett spells out the "theory of constructed emotion."

When you examine the lives of history's most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: They organize their lives around their work, but not their days. Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking. Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. Their towering creative achievements result from modest "working" hours. How did they manage to be so accomplished? Can a generation raised to believe that 80-hour workweeks are necessary for success learn something from the lives of the people who laid the foundations of chaos theory and topology or wrote Great Expectations? If some of history's greatest figures didn't put in immensely long hours, maybe the key to unlocking the secret of their creativity lies in understanding not just how they labored but how they rested, and how the two relate. Let's start by looking at the lives of two figures. They were both very accomplished in their fields.

Yuval Noah Harari's first book, Sapiens, was an international sensation. The Israeli historian's mind-bending tour through the triumph of Homo sapiens is a favorite of, among others, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama. His new book, Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow, is about what comes next for humanity -- and the threat our own intelligence and creative capacity poses to our future. I spoke with Harari recently for my podcast, The Ezra Klein Show. To hear our whole conversation, subscribe on iTunes (or wherever you get your podcasts) or stream it off SoundCloud. In this excerpt, which has been edited for length and clarity, Harari and I discuss the rise of artificial intelligence, whether digital consciousness is a necessary byproduct of digital intelligence, and what it will all mean for human beings. As you'll see, I'm a bit less convinced than Harari is that the computers are coming for our jobs, and that human beings are on the edge of economic uselessness.

On a velvety March evening in Mandeville Canyon, high above the rest of Los Angeles, Norman Lear's living room was jammed with powerful people eager to learn the secrets of longevity. When the symposium's first speaker asked how many people there wanted to live to two hundred, if they could remain healthy, almost every hand went up. The venture capitalists were keeping slim to maintain their imposing vitality, the scientists were keeping slim because they'd read--and in some cases done--the research on caloric restriction, and the Hollywood stars were keeping slim because of course. When Liz Blackburn, who won a Nobel Prize for her work in genetics, took questions, Goldie Hawn, regal on a comfy sofa, purred, "I have a question about the mitochondria. I've been told about a molecule called glutathione that helps the health of the cell?" Glutathione is a powerful antioxidant that protects cells and their mitochondria, which provide energy; some in Hollywood call it "the God molecule." But taken in excess it can muffle a number of bodily repair mechanisms, leading to liver and kidney problems or even the rapid and potentially fatal sloughing of your skin. Blackburn gently suggested that a varied, healthy diet was best, and that no single molecule was the answer to the puzzle of aging. Yet the premise of the evening was that answers, and maybe even an encompassing solution, were just around the corner. The party was the kickoff event for the National Academy of Medicine's Grand Challenge in Healthy Longevity, which will award at least twenty-five million dollars for breakthroughs in the field. Victor Dzau, the academy's president, stood to acknowledge several of the scientists in the room. He praised their work with enzymes that help regulate aging; with teasing out genes that control life span in various dog breeds; and with a technique by which an old mouse is surgically connected to a young mouse, shares its blood, and within weeks becomes younger. Joon Yun, a doctor who runs a health-care hedge fund, announced that he and his wife had given the first two million dollars toward funding the challenge. "I have the idea that aging is plastic, that it's encoded," he said. "If something is encoded, you can crack the code." To growing applause, he went on, "If you can crack the code, you can hack the code!" It's a big ask: more than a hundred and fifty thousand people die every day, the majority of aging-related diseases. Yet Yun believes, he told me, that if we hack the code correctly, "thermodynamically, there should be no reason we can't defer entropy indefinitely. We can end aging forever." Nicole Shanahan, the founder of a patent-management business, announced that her company would oversee longevity-related patents that Yun had pledged to the cause.

You'd have to possess a pretty colorful character, not to mention some serious acting chops, to steal scenes away from Jessica Lange while she's channeling screen diva Joan Crawford. Fortunately, Jackie Hoffman has both. From the moment she makes her first appearance in Feud: Bette and Joan, you can't take your eyes off Hoffman's tightly-wound but infinitely patient Mamacita -- Crawford's sternly Teutonic live-in housekeeper, valet, mother confessor and all around Gal Friday, who is never far from the movie star's side and always faithfully and fiercely on her side, even when Crawford believes no one else is. Mamacita is, delightfully, a true-life construct: Anna Marie Brinke was Crawford's German-born maid/personal assistant, hired shortly before the actress began mounting her planned comeback in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Brinke came recommended by her own daughter, one of her nine children and a maid to a Westhampton neighbor of Crawford's: she impressed the star with her preference for scrubbing floors on her hands and knees over using a mop.

It's not yet clear whether, with the rise of artificial intelligence, workforce automation will lead to an overall rise or drop in human job creation. That's the argument put forward by University of Geneva professor and tax lawyer Xavier Oberson. Oberson argues that as robots take over more and more jobs – particularly in the industry and service sectors – there will be a rise in unemployment and a corresponding drop in tax and social security receipts by governments all over the world. He believes that imposing a tax on work done by robots could help offset these losses. Logistically, he says this could be managed by creating a "legal entity" representing robots, just as is done today for corporations.

IBM Corp. is all-in on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The company provides a broad range of cognitive products for businesses of all sizes. However, it is also using its other product lines, such as its storage business, to assist customers in developing products around Internet of Things and machine learning. "We provide the storage platform with our flash technology to SparkCognition, a professional software company. They are a hot startup [with] a number of different use cases, including cybersecurity, real-time IoT and predictive analytics," said Eric Herzog (pictured, left), vice president of product marketing and management, storage, and software-defined infrastructure, at IBM. Herzog and Mark Godard (pictured, right), manager of customer success and partnerships at SparkCognition Inc., spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's mobile live streaming studio, during IBM Interconnect 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Artificial intelligence is all around. Tech giants and startups are cultivating their AI technology to create better ways of living such as riding on driverless cars and making payment by scanning your face. While this lies on the grounds that AI's practical skills can ultimately replace human labor, one startup believes that AI can be an emotional companion to human. Shanghai-based startup Emotibot made an AI-powered bot that can complete practical tasks as well as have a conversation with you. Corporates who want more customer interaction are in talk with the company to source their technology to humanize their online customer service.