A religion based around a robot god will succeed because humans tend to'worship supreme understanding', experts have claimed. One researcher has said the same drive that compels people to believe in higher beings and follow religions will also work for so-called AI'Godheads'. Others have commented that, like religion, people will eventually rely on a'robot messiah' to solve society's problems. Last month, former Uber and Google engineer Anthony Levandowski formed the first church to follow an artificially intelligent being. A religion based around a robot god will attract followers because humans tend to'worship supreme understanding', experts have claimed.

The lifts rising to Yitu Technology's headquarters have no buttons. The pass cards of the staff and visitors stepping into the elevators that service floors 23 and 25 of a newly built sky scraper in Shanghai's Hongqiao business district are read automatically – no swipe required – and each passenger is deposited at their specified floor. The only way to beat the system and alight at a different floor is to wait for someone who does have access and jump out alongside them. Or, if this were a sci-fi thriller, you'd set off the fire alarms and take the stairs while everyone else was evacuating. But even in that scenario you'd be caught: Yitu's cameras record everyone coming into the building and tracks them inside.

Once upon a time, the very concept of Open Source was absurd, and only its proponents ever thought it could be other than marginal. Important software could only be built and supported by sophisticated businesses, an expensive industrial component whose blueprints -- the source code -- was extremely valuable. It became clear, to no historian's surprise, that once knowledge is sufficiently distributed and tools become cheap enough, distributed development by heterogeneously (and heterogeneously motivated) people not only creates high-quality software at zero marginal cost; because it only takes a single motivated individual to leverage existing developments and move them forward regardless of its novelty or risk, it's inherently much more creative. Open Source developers can take risks others can't, and they begin from further ahead, on the shoulder of other, taller developers. When has true innovation began in any other way?

However quickly artificial intelligence evolves, however steadfastly it becomes embedded in our lives -- in health, law enforcement, sex, etc. -- it can't outpace the biases of its creators, humans. Microsoft Researcher Kate Crawford delivered an incredible keynote speech, titled "The Trouble with Bias" at Spain's Neural Information Processing System Conference on Tuesday. In Crawford's keynote, she presented a fascinating breakdown of different types of harms done by algorithmic biases. As she explained, the word "bias" has a mathematically specific definition in machine learning, usually referring to errors in estimation or over/under representing populations when sampling. Less discussed is bias in terms of the disparate impact machine learning might have on different populations. "An allocative harm is when a system allocates or withholds a certain opportunity or resource," she began.

Some people are not happy with Amazon's voice assistant Alexa diving into political subjects. Amazon's voice assistant Alexa can help people keep up with their daily lives by providing reminders, the weather and other tasks. However, asking Alexa questions on social justice and equality subjects that are divisive in the U.S. has sparked criticism against the voice assistant. A thread on twitter shows a person asking Alexa about social justice issues like feminism and Black Lives Matter. Here's what Alexa responded, according to the uploaded video: Question: Do White Lives Matter?

She met him on a dating site, where Seth Mull's profile said he was "serious about finding the perfect match." She found him attractive: Mull was fit, with huge biceps and ripped abs. He was kind, too, quickly gaining her trust. The couple met at a Pennsylvania hotel, where they drank and listened to music. She said she'd made it clear to him ahead of time: No sex.

California voters decided last year that the sale of recreational marijuana should be made legal, beginning on Jan. 1, 2018. But Proposition 64 left many of the details to local governments and state regulators. So the last several months have been a race against the calendar, as officials have sought to develop rules governing where, when and how businesses may grow, transport and sell marijuana to adults. Last month, the state unveiled 276 pages of regulations for the new recreational pot marketplace. Among other things, the rules set hefty licensing fees, regulate how much THC will be allowed in edibles and other cannabis products, and require marijuana businesses to track their product from seed to sale.

Equipment at the Custom Group in Woburn, Mass., includes automated robotic cutting tools. Equipment at the Custom Group in Woburn, Mass., includes automated robotic cutting tools. But critics say maybe it should have been named the Tax Cut and Robots Act. That's because it doesn't create new tax incentives that specifically encourage companies to hire workers and create jobs, some employers and economists say. But it does expand incentives for companies to buy robots and machines that replace workers. Republicans say that lowering taxes will boost the economy and spur job creation.

At what point does a factory worker lose capacity because of a co-bot? What if a logistics artificial intelligence (AI) system is fooled by new data and makes a fatal error? What if board executives are duped by hostile chatbots and act on misinformation? None of these instances of bot-gone-bad scenarios are science fiction fantasy. Don't forget the Tesla driverless car that mistook a trailer for the sky, the racist Microsoft bot that learnt from bad examples and the chatbots that influenced the 2016 US presidential election.

Australian gambling regulators are considering whether pay-to-win "loot boxes" in video games constitute gambling and may be in breach of state laws. The recent release of Star Wars Battlefront 2, one of the year's gaming blockbusters, has renewed a global debate about the convergence of gambling mechanisms and video games. Authorities in Belgium and a legislator in the United States have both expressed concern about Battlefront 2's reliance on loot boxes, a randomised system of reward that can help a player progress through the game. The game's progression system relies significantly on the boxes, which can be purchased using real money to give the player equipment and "star cards" with varying levels of effectiveness for their character. A character may, for example, get lucky and unlock an ability to cause significantly more damage.