Errol Morris feels that Thomas Kuhn saved him from a career he was not suited for--by having him thrown out of Princeton. In 1972, Kuhn was a professor of philosophy and the history of science at Princeton, and author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which gave the world the term "paradigm shift." As Morris tells the story in his recent book, The Ashtray, Kuhn was antagonized by Morris' suggestions that Kuhn was a megalomaniac and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was an assault on truth and progress. To say the least, Morris, then 24, was already the iconoclast who would go on to make some of the most original documentary films of our time. After launching the career he was suited for with The Gates of Heaven in 1978, a droll affair about pet cemeteries, Morris earned international acclaim with The Thin Blue Line, which led to the reversal of a murder conviction of a prisoner who had been on death row. In 2004, Morris won an Academy Award for The Fog of War, a dissection of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a major architect of the Vietnam War. His 2017 film, Wormwood, a miniseries on Netflix, centers on the mystery surrounding a scientist who in 1975 worked on a biological warfare program for the Army, and suspiciously fell to his death from a hotel room. The Ashtray--Morris explains the title in our interview below--is as arresting and idiosyncratic as Morris' films.

If you think it's been a problem up to this point, the fight against fake news is about to get a whole lot harder. That is thanks to artificial intelligence technology which is making the creation of so-called "deep fake" videos more convincing at a frankly terrifying rate. The latest development comes from an international team of researchers, lead by Germany's Max Planck Institute for Informatics. They have created a deep-learning A.I. system which is able to edit the facial expression of actors to accurately match dubbed voices. In addition, it can tweak gaze and head poses in videos, and even animate a person's eyes and eyebrows to match up with their mouths -- representing a step forward from previous work in this area.

Machine learning is one of those technologies that is invariably around us but one that we might not even comprehend. For instance, machine learning is employed to resolve issues like deciding if an email that we got is spam or a genuine one, how cars can drive on their own, and what product someone is likely to purchase. Every day, we tend to see these sorts of machine learning solutions in action. This definition brings up the key component of machine realizing, specifically that the framework figures out how to tackle the issue from illustration information, instead of us composing a particular rationale. This is a noteworthy advancement for how writing a computer program is finished.

When researchers working on developing a machine learning-based tool for detecting fake news realized there wasn't enough data to train their algorithms, they did the only rational thing: They crowd-sourced hundreds of bullshit news articles and fed them to the machine. The algorithm, which was developed by researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of Amsterdam, uses natural language processing (NLP) to search for specific patterns or linguistic cues that indicate a particular article is fake news. This is different from a fact checking algorithm that cross-references an article with other pieces to see if it contains inconsistent information – this machine learning solution could automate the detection process entirely. No offense to the Michigan/Amsterdam team but building an NLP algorithm to parse sentence structure and hone in on keywords isn't exactly the bleeding edge artificial intelligence work that drops jaws. Getting it to detect fake news better than people, however, is.

The camera is the eye for many automated devices and the computer is the brain -- but researchers at Stanford University recently combined the two in an attempt to make smart cameras more compact. A team of graduate students recently created an artificially intelligent camera that doesn't need a large, separate computer to process all the data -- because it's built into the optics itself. Current object recognition technology uses A.I. on a separate computer to run the images or footage through algorithms to identify objects. As the Stanford researchers explain, driverless cars have a large computer in the trunk in order to recognize when a pedestrian steps out in front of the car's path. Those computers are big, require lots of energy and are often slow.

Most of the artificial intelligence used for translation, tagging photos on Facebook, and optimizing the best route for navigation relies on humans feeding the AI some information to start. We show the algorithms which sentences are equivalent in other languages, what a person looks like in different photos, and how to plot the ideal course for a car. But some AI researchers are exploring how to give algorithms a sense of curiosity, so they can learn without any human guidance. New research from OpenAI, the non-profit AI lab founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and other Silicon Valley bigwigs, in collaboration with researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of Edinburgh, has found that when an AI algorithm is given a simple definition of curiosity, it can, without any human-provided information, explore more than 50 video games--and even beat some of them. But curiosity comes with a cost.

Google Assistant wants to tell you some good news. A new skill aims to give users a reprieve from the oft-depressing daily news cycle by making it easier for them to find more uplifting headlines. Now, users can ask Google Assistant to'Tell me something good,' and it will trigger a'daily dose of good news,' according to the search giant. Google says the skill is launching as an'experimental feature' that's now available on any devices that are equipped with Assistant, such as phones, smart displays and the Google Home, the firm's voice-activated smart speaker. Assistant will serve up stories that are primarily focused around people who are doing things to help their communities and the world, Google explained.

"Video games have not only helped the music industry survive, but thrive on entirely new levels," Steve Schnur tells me. As the worldwide executive and president of music at game publisher EA, his team – many of whom have been professional musicians and singer/songwriters – work with some of the biggest music acts in the world, licensing music for video game series like Fifa, Madden NFL, Need for Speed and NHL. Since the 90s, when licensed music became prevalent in games, series such as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Grand Theft Auto and Wipeout have become just as well-known for their soundtracks as they are for their gameplay. For millions of people, video games have been a way to discover new favourite bands or dive into other musical genres. And because people discover this music while playing a game they love, they develop a strong emotional attachment to it.

A version of Alexa won't tell kids where babies come from or spill the beans about Santa. It also won't explain some things kids might have heard on the news - like what Stormy Daniels does for a living. Amazon updated its voice assistant with a feature that can make Alexa more kid-friendly. Achild holds his Amazon Echo Dot in Kennesaw, Ga. Amazon updated its voice assistant with a feature that can make Alexa more kid-friendly.

Artificial intelligence has been THE buzzword in every tech-driven industry over the past few years as speculation around its impact on human society has been speculated upon by scientists, entrepreneurs, philosophers, politicians and the media outlets. The diversity in opinion highlights the fact that nobody really knows how AI will change our relationship with technology and each other. AI will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the human biological machine intelligence of our civilisation a billion-fold. The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.