This article is part of a series exploring the skills leaders must learn to make the most of rapid change in an increasingly disruptive world. The first article in the series, "How the Most Successful Leaders Will Thrive in an Exponential World," broadly outlines four critical leadership skills--futurist, technologist, innovator, and humanitarian--and how they work together. Today's post, part five in the series, takes a more detailed look at leaders as technologists. Be sure to check out part two of the series, "How Leaders Dream Boldly to Bring New Futures to Life," part three of the series, "How All Leaders Can Make the World a Better Place," and part four of the series, "How Leaders Can Make Innovation Everyone's Day Job". In the 1990s, Tower Records was the place to get new music.

An "art" landscape photograph from Interlaken, Switzerland, produced from a Google Earth image by Creatism -- Google's new experimental "deep-learning system for artistic content creation." There are many professions where human workers are being replaced by intelligent machines. Cashiers at stores and restaurants, factory workers, even farm laborers are all being swapped out for robots at a dizzying pace. Until now, however, those in the artistic professions felt pretty safe from the threat. After all, how could an algorithm ever replicate the inenarrable process of human creativity?

When experimenting with machine learning and big data, you may identify data sets that contain streams of text that contain customer reviews, or social media posts where customers (or potential customers) are talking about a product, brand or service that you offer. Mining such data to determine how people feel about your product, brand, or service, is called Sentiment Analysis. People have always had an interest in what people think, or what their opinion is. Since the inception of the internet, increasing numbers of people are using websites and services to express their opinion. With social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, it is becoming feasible to automate and gauge what public opinion is on a given topic, news story, product, or brand.

Forget about advanced artificial intelligence killing off humanity, we have more immediate concerns! Like, say, dodging machine-generated Game of Thrones spoilers. Thanks to Milan Janosov at the Central European University, a future could exist where you're having to warn your toaster off revealing the next death in the popular (and bloody) TV series. Before we continue, this post contains, uh, predicted spoilers for the show. Who knows how accurate they are, but it's worth pointing out now if you're worried.

The "deep artificial composer", or "DAC" for short, generates brand-new melodies that imitate traditional folk music of Irish or Klezmer origin. It does so without plagiarizing already existing ones, since melodies it writes are as original as those produced by a human composer. The results were presented in April at this year's edition of the Evostar conference. The DAC actually produces musical scores of melodies, symbolic music written using notation, and does not generate audio files. The deep artificial composer can produce complete melodies, with a beginning and an end, that are completely novel and that share features that we relate to style," says Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) scientists Florian Colombo who developed the artificial intelligence under the guidance of Wulfram Gerstner, director of the Computational Neuroscience Laboratory. "To my knowledge, this is the first time that an artificial neural network model has produced entire and convincing melodies.

Here's a sentence you don't get to read everyday: Kristen Stewart has surprised the artificial intelligence community by publishing a paper on machine learning. The Twilight actress recently made her directorial debut with the short film Come Swim, and in it used a machine learning technique known as "style transfer" (where the aesthetics of one image or video is applied to another) to create an impressionistic visual style. Along with special effects engineer Bhautik J Joshi and producer David Shapiro, Stewart has co-authored a paper on this work in the film, publishing it in the popular online repository for non-peer reviewed work, arXiv. The paper itself is titled "Bringing Impressionism to Life with Neural Style Transfer in Come Swim," and offers a detailed case study on how to use this sort of machine learning in a film. The paper describes Come Swim as a "poetic, impressionistic portrait of a heartbroken man underwater," with the film's aesthetic grounded by a painting of Stewart's showing a "man rousing from sleep." The team used existing neural networks to transfer the style of this painting onto a test frame, and then fine-tuned their setup by adding "blocks of color and texture" until they'd created the desired painting-like effect.

Understanding how today's AI works might seem overwhelming, but it really boils down to two concepts you probably have heard of before: "machine learning" and "deep learning". Neither are brand new ideas, but the way they're used seems to constantly evolve. Machine learning and deep learning are how Netflix knows what you might want to watch next, or how Facebook can recognize your friends' face in a photo, or how a support agent can figure out if you'll be satisfied with your customer service. So what are these buzzwords that still dominate the conversations about AI, and how exactly are they different? And what do they mean for customer service?

When San Francisco bay area-based composer and electronic music DJ Mason Bates recently visited the childhood home of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Jobs, he was in awe. "It all started in that garage," Bates said in a hushed, reverent voice, as we pulled up in the composer's 1970s Alfa Romeo outside the nondescript bungalow at 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos. Located on an un-trafficked suburban street, the building's only distinguishing feature was the "no trespassing" sign on the austere patch of lawn out front. "That's where he built the early Apple computers," Bates said, hesitant to get out of the car to take a closer look, lest we disturb the occupants. "That's where the world's most valuable company began. The fabled garage was designated a historical landmark in 2013. It's been eulogized in films like Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) and Jobs (2013), as well as books such as Walter Isaacson's expansive 2011 biography of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

For better or worse, technology has taught us that we shouldn't have to wait anymore. We can access the news instantly, wherever we are, on our mobile devices. We can watch a favorite movie on demand via Netflix or another streaming service. "One-click purchase" represents the amount of time it takes to buy. In fact, the ease and speed of e-commerce has gotten to the point that it's practically a national holiday.

A new talking sidekick arrived Wednesday on millions of Samsung Galaxy S8 phones. To understand what makes chatting with Bixby different from Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant, Samsung would like us to picture Iron Man. Injong Rhee, Samsung's head of mobile software R&D, told me the electronics giant's late-to-the-game voice assistant was inspired by Tony Stark. In the movies, he just barks commands and his systems leap into action. Billionaire inventors don't have to tap through menus to fire their unibeam chest projectors. Samsung wants to make all kinds of devices conversational.