Developments in artificial intelligence are now "a runaway train" and urgently require the attention of philosophers and other humanists, a professor has argued. Mark Kingwell, professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, spoke on "Humans and Artificial Intelligence – What Happens Next?

One is what we call consciousness, the mind, is actually something like an artificial intelligence. If the universe is a computer simulation, we are all likely one form of AI or another. In fact, we might come from the same computer that is creating this simulated universe to begin with.

Yet the greater potential comes from applications like the Watson artificial intelligence initiative, which could help revolutionize industries across the corporate spectrum.

Sexually explicit videos featuring these and a number of other female celebrities have surfaced online in recent days, foreshadowing what could be Hollywood's next big sex-tape nightmare. Only this time, the videos in question haven't been stolen by hackers, or commissioned by porn studios, starring barely-lookalikes. Instead, these new clips have been made with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) technology capable of swapping the faces of porn stars with those of famous actresses and other celebrities. These so-called Deepfakes -- a combination of'fake' and'deep learning' -- first started popping up online in December, when a Reddit user began to post explicit videos seemingly featuring celebrities online. The user in question told Motherboard at the time that he was using images found by Google image search as well as stock photos and YouTube videos to "train" AI algorithms, and essentially give them an idea of how a celebrity's face would look like in any given moment.

The sexually explicit videos haven't been stolen by hackers, or commissioned by porn studios featuring celebrity lookalikes. Instead, these clips have been made using artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The images, called "deepfakes," are porn stars with their faces swapped for those of famous actresses and other celebrities. This new technology requires only three basic steps: collect a photoset of a person, choose a pornographic video to manipulate, and then wait for the computer to do the rest, although it can take more than 40 hours just for a short clip. The most popular "deepfakes" feature celebrities, but the process can work on anyone as long as there is a clear enough picture of the person.

Most people familiar with "face-swapping" know it as an innocuous social media feature. The result is rarely seamless and often funny. But as it grows more sophisticated, that technology has taken a sinister turn: It's now become easier to superimpose the faces of celebrities onto those of actors in pornographic films, resulting in highly-realistic fake videos. Deepfakes, as the digital form is called, takes its name from the Redditor "deepfakes," the first person known to create these fake porn videos. Celebrities Daisy Ridley, Gal Gadot and Taylor Swift are among deepfakes' early victims.

There are a lot of serious topics covered in Altered Carbon, a new science fiction series from Netflix. It delves into misogynistic power structures and the nature of identity. It touches on just how much of our morality is driven by the fact that we die and what might happen if death suddenly stopped being an endpoint and, instead, became a minor stopgap in an ultimately immortal life. But that is not what I'm here to talk to you about. Because while watching Altered Carbon -- even the stuff I didn't like all that much -- my primary critical reaction was, "This is so RAD!!!!" Imagine me sitting in the back of eighth-grade study hall, filling my notebook with scrawled images from this show (that my parents don't know I've seen, because if they did, my Netflix consumption would be seriously questioned), occasionally clicking over my four-color pen to red to write the word "rad" in all caps in the margins.

In one episode of Netflix's dystopian science fiction television series insurance company carries around a little contraption that allows her to tap into people's memories. This highly useful device, when connected to a person's temples, gives Black Mirror, an investigator from an a video replay of his or her memories of any given time and place. This makes it easy for the investigator to probe an accident that her company's client – the insured – has been involved in, so she can ensure he has a strong case for a claim against the company that owns the self-driving vehicle that knocked him down. Don't worry, that's not a spoiler. What it is, is a sign that insurance technology has become sexy enough to have made its Netflix debut, and is poised to spread its influence in real lives as well.

Popular GIF hosting and creation site Gfycat has come out against the rising new trend of artificial intelligence-generated fake pornography. Colloquially known as "deepfakes," after the Reddit user who popularized the technique back in December, these short-form videos typically feature porn stars with the faces of celebrities, with the face swapping achieved by feeding a neural network with thousands of photos and videos and then training the network using popular, open source machine learning techniques. News of Gfycat's stance on deepfakes was first reported by Motherboard, which also first reported on the existence of deepfakes, as well as the subreddit dedicated to the practice and its growing popularity. "Our terms of service allow us to remove content that we find objectionable. We are actively removing this content," a Gfycat spokesperson told The Verge.

This AI robot once said it wanted to destroy humans. While the robot can respond to many questions, some of the answers will leave you a little bewildered. A full transcript of the video follows. Sophia: My name is Sophia, and I am an artificially intelligent robot who wants to help change the world for the better. She is the world's first robot citizen.