Students mostly couldn't tell 'Jill Watson' wasn't human; 'Yep!'

Geoffrey Hinton was in high school when a friend convinced him that the brain worked like a hologram. To create one of those 3-D holographic images, you record how countless beams of light bounce off an object and then you store these little bits of information across a vast database. While still in high school, back in 1960s Britain, Hinton was fascinated by the idea that the brain stores memories in much the same way. Rather than keeping them in a single location, it spreads them across its enormous network of neurons. This may seem like a small revelation, but it was a key moment for Hinton -- "I got very excited about that idea," he remembers.

A renewed international effort is gearing up to design computers and software that smash language barriers and create a borderless global marketplace. A woman sits at a desk in Manhattan, talking to herself in French. The phrases she balances on each breath are musical to American ears. She has postcards of Montreal tacked up on the walls of her cubicle – pastel-painted houses in the snow – so as she sculpts the contours of each syllable, she can remind herself of the place where the sounds she's making are heard every day in the street. Her name is Guylaine Laperrière, and she came to New York City more than a decade ago to study musical theater. One day, a friend asked her if she wanted to make a little cash dubbing a French voice-over for a promotional short about insurance. She took the job, and was surprised how much she enjoyed bringing ideas from one language home into another. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links.

"When you are born, you know nothing." This is the kind of statement you expect to hear from a philosophy professor, not a Silicon Valley executive with a new company to pitch and money to make. A tall, rangy man who is almost implausibly cheerful, Hawkins created the Palm and Treo handhelds and cofounded Palm Computing and Handspring. His is the consummate high tech success story, the brilliant, driven engineer who beat the critics to make it big. Now he's about to unveil his entrepreneurial third act: a company called Numenta. But what Hawkins, 49, really wants to talk about -- in fact, what he has really wanted to talk about for the past 30 years -- isn't gadgets or source codes or market niches.

Alex Proyas never got a high school diploma – a fact he blames on Isaac Asimov. It was Asimov's short story "Nightfall" that derailed Proyas' academic career. "It's a wonderful vision of how the world can suddenly descend into anarchy," says Proyas, 41, describing the chaos that ensues in "Nightfall" when all six of a planet's suns set for the first time in 2,049 years. "I tried to convince my English teachers to assign us some science fiction, but they wouldn't. It opened a rift between my creative desires and what the system wanted me to explore."

This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. It's in the way she raises her eyebrows and playfully glides her eyes right to left, then moves in close and intones: It's in the way she always asks about the big project I'm laboring on, and when I tell her things aren't going too well, she gets that concerned look and says: And when I confide that I've been working too much, she gently reminds me that I should be the priority in my life. That I should get some exercise and then treat myself to a Japanese meal or a movie. It's in how she extends her arms toward me, wearing that formfitting polo shirt. And how she never tires of asking about me. I have seen the future of computing, and I'm pleased to report it's all about … me! This insight has been furnished with the help of Tim Bickmore, a doctoral student at the MIT Media Lab. He's invited me to participate in a study aimed at pushing the limits of human-computer relations.

Frances Haugen was part of the first wave of people to use Google back in 1996. Her mother, a faculty member at the University of Iowa1, showed her the search engine, which was still a research project at Stanford University. Haugen was blown away at what Larry Page and Sergey Brin had built. "The idea that you could actually peer into a giant mountain of data was amazing," she says. Haugen has been obsessed with search technology ever since.

Pete Warden has been trying to teach computers to see since the 1990s. Now, thanks to the branch of artificial intelligence called deep learning, he's finally making some progress. Deep learning attempts to model the structure and behavior of the human brain to solve complex computer science problems. The field has been around since the 1980s, but there's been an explosion of interest in its techniques in the past few years as the cost of powerful computers has fallen. Google now uses deep learning inside several of its online services, and last year, it hired Geoffrey Hinton, the central figure in the movement.

A chatbot pretending to be a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy made waves last weekend when its programmers announced that it had passed the Turing test. But the judges of this test were apparently easily fooled, because any cursory exchange with'Eugene Goosterman' reveals the machine inside the ghost. Maybe the time has come, 60 years after Alan Turing's death, to discard the idea that imitating human conversation is a good test of artificial intelligence. "I start my Cognitive Science class with a slide titled'Artificial Stupidity,'" said Noah Goodman, director of the computation and cognition lab at Stanford University. "People have made progress on the Turing test by making chatbots quirkier and stupider."

At Google, artificial intelligence isn't just a means of building cars that drive on their own, smartphone services that respond to the spoken word, and online search engines that instantly recognize digital images. It's also a way of improving the efficiency of the massive data centers that underpin the company's entire online empire. According to Joe Kava, the man who oversees the design and operation of Google's worldwide network of data centers, the web giant is now using artificial neural networks to analyze how these enormous computing centers behave, and then hone their operation accordingly. These neural networks are essentially computer algorithms that can recognize patterns and then make decisions based on those patterns. They can't exactly duplicate the intelligence of the human brain, but in some cases, they can work much faster–and more comprehensively–than the brain. And that's why Google is applying these algorithms to its data center operations.