"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it will take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded." This sounds like it could be an excerpt from the screenplay to the 1984 film "The Terminator," but it's actually physicist Stephen Hawking in late 2014, talking to the BBC. As part of the scientific advisory board for the Future of Life Institute based in Boston, Hawking and engineer/entrepreneur Elon Musk helped to create an open letter on artificial intelligence that highlighted both the positive and negative aspects of AI.

"You are worse than a fool; you have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible." When William Gibson wrote those words in his groundbreaking 1984, novel Neuromancer, artificial intelligence remained almost entirely within the realm of science fiction. Today, however, the convergence of complex algorithms, big data, and exponential increases in computational power has resulted in a world where AI raises significant ethical and human rights dilemmas, involving rights ranging from the right to privacy to due process.

Of all the dimensions of Elon Musk that fascinate his fans--his intellect, his work ethic, his rockets, his dating life--there's one that hasn't been definitively explained: his seemingly self-restoring hairline. In early career moments, like a 1999 CNN segment that followed Musk getting a McLaren F1, or a 2000 image of he and Peter Thiel hyping PayPal, normal signs of male pattern baldness are visible. Since then, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla appears to have found a solution, but it's his earlier incarnation that an experimental artist has plastered across San Francisco this week. And that artist has a theory. "I'm pretty blown away at how good his hair plugs are," says Katsu, whose mysterious posters appeared in San Francisco and New York City.

This acquisition will further expand its suite of capabilities that deliver an enhanced customer experience and security. Artificial intelligence plays a critical role in enabling consumer convenience, while delivering enhanced security. This advanced technology delivers greater insights from every transaction to assist in making even more accurate fraud decisions. "To fully realize the promise of our increasingly digital lives, we need to design our payment systems with the future in mind and that's what we're doing," said Ajay Bhalla, president of enterprise risk and security for Mastercard. "Our unprecedented use of artificial intelligence on our network is already proving successful. With the acquisition of Brighterion, we will further extend our capabilities to support the consumer experience."

Here is a very real and true thing: 2017 is making it really hard to be a science fiction writer. To be sure, these times -- by which I mean the Trump era to date, let's go ahead and avoid cutesy winking allusions -- are making it hard for lots of writers, not just the ones who write science fiction. It's difficult to focus on writing, particularly fiction, when the world feels like it's on fire and everyone you know is trying to decide between hiding in a hole or taking up recreational alcoholism to get by. The rapid-fire pace of events is such that you (or at least I) end up sitting at the computer sort of paralyzed. In the last few weeks we've had (in no particular order) the healthcare vote, hurricane Scaramucci, North Korea and racists marching with Tiki torches like the domestic terrorists they are.

Recognizing whether people are expressing positive or negative opinions about things has obvious business applications. It's simplistic, sometimes too simplistic, but it's one of the easiest ways to get measurable results from NLP. In a few steps, you can put text in one end and get positive and negative scores out the other, and you never have to figure out what you should do with a parse tree or a graph of entities or any difficult representation like that. This model is not the point of that paper, so don't take this as an attack on their results; it was there as an example of a well-known way to use word vectors.

Sentiment analysis is a very frequently-implemented task in NLP, and it's no surprise. Recognizing whether people are expressing positive or negative opinions about things has obvious business applications. It's used in social media monitoring, customer feedback, and even automatic stock trading (leading to bots that buy Berkshire Hathaway when Anne Hathaway gets a good movie review). It's simplistic, sometimes too simplistic, but it's one of the easiest ways to get measurable results from NLP. In a few steps, you can put text in one end and get positive and negative scores out the other, and you never have to figure out what you should do with a parse tree or a graph of entities or any difficult representation like that.

According to Kreutzer, "It's only AI when you don't know how it works; once it works, it's just software." Why did Liberty Mutual even consider using AI? As a life long geek, Jeff thought that AI was a cool thing to explore. The purpose of this exploration was to try to reduce some of the cognitive load, some of the lower-value tasks that slow the legal department's lawyers down. Ultimately, it was intended to allow the lawyers to focus on higher-value tasks. With all the hype about AI, it is easy to be dazzled by the "pixie dust" aspects of the technology.

The former engineer at the centre of Uber's self-driving car legal troubles has urged ex-Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick to criticise Tesla's Elon Musk and several of his claims about autonomous vehicles. Anthony Levandowski, whom Uber fired in May, sent a text to Kalanick in September that criticised Musk for saying Tesla was unlikely to use lidar sensors for its cars. The message was among those released as part of the ongoing lawsuit against Uber by Alphabet's Waymo, which has accused Levandowski of stealing trade secrets. "We've got to start calling Elon on his shit," Levandowski wrote in the texts, which were turned over by lawyers for Kalanick. "I'm not on social media but let's start'faketesla' and start give physics lessons about stupid shit Elon says like this." Weeks before the text messages, Tesla unveiled an update to its Autopilot driver-assistance system that uses radar and a GPS database to guide its vehicles.

Artificial intelligence is already capable of creating a staggering array of content. It can paint, write music, and put together a musical. It can write movies, angsty poems, and truly awful stand-up comedy. But does it have ownership over what it produces? For example, an AI at Google has managed to create sounds that humans have not heard before, merging characteristics of two different instruments and opening up a whole new toolbox for musicians to play around with.