The newly released Sonos product is a soundbar – that long, narrow speaker that sits under your TV pumping out bullet ricochet sound effects and atmospheric rumblings thanks to cunningly placed tweeters and woofers that create a soundstage wider than the speaker itself. The Sonos Beam, as it's called, is more compact than most soundbars, including the company's previous TV helpers – the Playbar and Playbase – so that bigger soundstage is especially important here. At the product's launch, I sat down with CEO Patrick Spence. Spence is the former chief operating officer who moved to the big job in January 2017. He is charismatic and welcoming, with the utterly unflappable, chilled vibe of someone who has music in the background all day long.

The robotics program at Disney has taken a giant, back-flipping leap forward with the unveiling of a humanoid robot capable of performing stunts just like a human. A video of the Stuntronics robot shows the autonomous machine launching into the air from a swing and performing several flips, before landing in a net. The unveiling of the acrobatic robot comes just one month after Disney revealed its much more rudimental Stickman robot. Both robots come out of Disney's Imagineering Research and Development department, which was set up a decade ago to explore virtual reality, robotics and other emerging technologies. The Stickman robot was the first step towards creating the human-scale robot, capable of performing backflips and other stunts.

"Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all" – so said John F. Kennedy in 1963. With recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI), some will question whether this statement still holds true. While computers have been used to assist with creative processes for some time, the creative input has largely been human. However, recent advances in machine learning software have changed all this. Using machine learning, computers now have the ability to'learn' without being explicitly programmed with any task-specific rules. As a result, AI is already writing new articles, poems and books, creating paintings and artistic works, producing video games, and composing music.

Scientists are enlisting the help of the general public to make an algorithm more human, after it began displaying psychopathic tendencies. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created an algorithm named Norman, in tribute to the character Norman Bates in 1960 Hitchcock horror film Psycho, and trained it using gruesome picture captions, causing it to associate objects with death. They produced what has been labelled the "world's first psychopath artificial intelligence", which sees horrific images in everything it is fed. As part of the experiment, they have set up an online version of the Rorschach test to see whether the general public's opinions can retrain Norman.

Mere days after picking up a statuette for Boyhood, Patricia Arquette was off solving computer-crimes on CSI: Cyber. Eddie Redmayne took home the gold for The Theory of Everything, and celebrated by bellowing his way through an utterly incomprehensible turn in Jupiter Ascending. A decade and a half out from his win for The Pianist, and Adrien Brody is still doing this. To this proud list we may now add Gary Oldman, who may not have won this year's best actor prize at all if Netflix's new sci-fi picture Tau got a release prior to the voting deadline. Oldman voices the title character, an artificial intelligence program tasked with keeping reluctant test subject Julia (a lost-looking Maika Monroe) captive, and not since Patrick Stewart voiced a literal pile of feces in The Emoji Movie has an actor so thoroughly embarrassed themselves without appearing onscreen.

You're looking for new approaches to marketing a beloved 90s sitcom, which has already been enormously successful in syndication and home video sales. The show produced hundreds of half-hour episodes--more than 80 hours of video altogether. How do you determine which scenes will best resonate with your target audiences? How could you know what clips cue which emotions, and how those emotions might affect what people want to watch? How do you find the needle in the haystack that will maximize the impact of your ongoing marketing efforts?

The world has a fake news problem. And with the speed and scale of false information being spread across the internet, it can seem impossible to stop. Artificial intelligence could be a way to slow its spread--and help stop companies profiting from intentional or accidental dissemination. The method will be complex but the idea is simple. AI can be trained to identify fake news and gather data on sites that are the most prolific in peddling it--or just sloppy in their fact checking, experts say.

If you were inventing the farm today, why would you put it outside, on a giant plot of land? OK, there's the sunlight thing, but then you get droughts and frosts and plant-munching insects that have to be battled with harmful pesticides. And because outdoor farms need so much acreage, they're usually far from most of their customers -- which means that by the time a tomato gets to you in a city, it tastes like a baseball. But now, upstarts such as Bowery farming, AeroFarms, and Lettuce Networks are doing something different. They're using data and artificial intelligence to operate more efficiently than traditional farms. The new generation of farming promises to feed more people while doing less environmental damage.

For many of us, meetings are a boring waste of time but technology could soon help make them more interesting and productive. What do you do during a boring meeting? I canvassed some opinions on Twitter and the results were enlightening. Some people compose haikus, others play meeting bingo, seeing how many pre-agreed words they can chuck in to the conversation. Some secretly check out Grindr on their phones or watch catch-up TV, while others fiddle with their jewellery, doodle, or simply nod off.

Suppose you could merely imagine a computation, and a digital prostheses, an extension of your biological brain, would turn it into code that instantly realizes what you had in mind. Imagine looking at an image, dataset or set of equations and wanting to analyze and explore its meaning as an artistic whim or part of a scientific investigation. I don't mean you would use an existing software suite to produce a standard visualization, but rather you would make use of an extensive repository of existing code to assemble a new program analogous to how a composer draws upon a repertoire of musical motifs, themes and styles to construct new works, and tantamount to having a talented musical amanuensis who, in addition to copying your scores, takes liberties with your prior work, making small alterations here and there and occasionally adding new works of its own invention, novel but consistent with your taste and sensibilities. Perhaps the interaction would be wordless and you would express your objective by simply focusing your attention and guiding your imagination, the prostheses operating directly on patterns of activation arising in your primary sensory, proprioceptive and associative cortex that have become part of an extensive vocabulary that you now share with your personal digital amanuensis. Or perhaps it would involve a conversation conducted in subvocal, unarticulated speech in which you specify what it is you want to compute and your assistant asks questions to clarify your intention and the two of you share examples of input and output to ground your internal conversation in concrete terms. More than thirty years ago, Charles Rich and Richard Waters published an MIT AI Lab technical report [68] entitled The Programmer's Apprentice: A Research Overview. Whether they intended it or not, it would have been easy in those days for someone to misremember the title and inadvertently refer to it as "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" since computer programmers at the time were often characterized as wizards and most children were familiar with the Walt Disney movie Fantasia, featuring music written by Paul Dukas inspired by Goethe's poem of the same name