If you thought watching Westworld was like flipping through a blood-soaked college philosophy textbook, you weren't wrong. Its meditations on the nature of the mind are growing increasingly knotty, putting flesh and bones to the meandering thought experiments that keep undergrads up at night. Episode 4 of Season 2 opens in a sleek apartment. Jim Delos (Peter Mullan) is going through his morning routine: riding his exercise bike, sitting down to a cup of coffee, and with a trembling hand spilling the cream. The apartment's walls are one-way mirrors, and on the other side, technicians monitor the conversation.

This week at Google's big conference, Google I/O, the tech giant unveiled a demonstration of the Google Assistant booking a haircut over the phone. To much of the audience's surprise, the bot sounded a lot like a real person--with human-like pauses and ticks. This feature, called Duplex, can only be used in exchanges that are functional and in "closed domains". This means Duplex could work perfectly with something like making reservations. The Network writer Jason Deign saw this robot-calling phenomenon coming last year in his piece "Could a robot fool you on the phone?"

When it comes to dreaming about the future, there are several key technological categories that manage to be both highly practical yet futuristic enough for us to consider. But just like with everything new, it has to replace the old, upending our world. The chief among those is artificial intelligence (AI). We do not have to wait at all to see AI's influence in our society and various sectors either. It has already made numerous tasks in a variety of sectors different with machine learning.

Many of you will have heard of artificial intelligence (AI). You are probably aware that it is not the indestructible Arnie chasing after you in an old, abandoned factory but you may not realise how much of your life already functions on AI. As a general rule, any digital system that exhibits an aspect of human intelligence, such as perception or decision-making, is likely to be running on AI. Have you ever wondered how Google Maps precisely knows every location you search for? The amount of imagery data that would need to be analysed to annotate each house address in the entire world would take an army of workers several years.

The word "bot" is a name given to artificial intelligence (AI) that takes the place of player characters in online multiplayer video games.

The network uses two artificial intelligence algorithms, working both with and against each other.

South Africa is facing a shortage of data scientists – a new breed of analytical data experts with the technical skills to solve complex problems. They're part mathematician, part computer scientist and part trend-spotter. And, because they straddle both the business and IT worlds, they're highly sought-after and well paid. The demand for data scientists is being driven by the emergence of big data – that unwieldy mass of unstructured information that can no longer be ignored and forgotten. It's a potential gold mine for companies – as long as there's someone who can dig in and unearth the business insights that no one thought to look for before.

Stats LLC, a Chicago sports data and technology company, is creating artificial intelligence to be used in sports broadcasts.