Joe Gordon likes to climb mountains. Among his conquests is Mount Teide, a 12,000ft volcano in Tenerife. "I like to walk up hills and mountains," he says. "I am a big fan of a healthy body and a healthy mind." It is perhaps just as well that he has a head for heights.

The South By Southwest (SXSW) festival is a whirlwind best described as "trying to drink from a firehose". There is so much happening at any one moment you have a real fear of missing out. Even though this was my third visit, the challenge of navigating the schedule to ensure you find the gems while making time to meet some of the most brilliant minds in tech, digital and content creation can be overwhelming. Robotics is moving at a rapid pace but still the sheer oddness and impracticality of what I saw was at times astounding. The best example for me was presented by Japanese Communication giant NTTS's Dr Higashinaka and roboticist Dr Ishiguro who have built life-sized robotic humanoid models that can have basic conversations with humans.

The new project, which uses Adobe's AI and machine learning program Sensei and integrates into the Adobe Experience Manager CMS, will debut at the company's Sneaks competition later in March. While Adobe hasn't committed to integrating it into any of its products, it's one of the most ambitious attempts to marry machine learning and graphic design to date. There have been efforts to use AI in the design world before–for instance, Wix's Advance Design Intelligence and automated projects like Mark Maker, but Adobe's is notable because of the company's sheer reach in the design world. Although it's just a prototype, it's one to watch closely. The as-of-yet unnamed new product is designed, first and foremost, to make it easier to customize websites for users at large-enterprise customers. When I viewed a demo, for instance, machine learning and AI techniques were applied to editing the Food Network's web pages.

Scientists from the Oxford University along with Google's DeepMind have developed an artificial intelligence system that can lip-read better than humans. The system was trained by thousands of hours of BBC news programs, the media outlet said Friday. The system, called "Watch, Attend and Spell," can correctly lip-read 50 percent of silent speech correctly, while professional lip-readers only got 12 percent right, researchers found. Read: Google AI Firm DeepMind Develops'Streams' App to Help UK Doctors With Patients Some words that rhyme, such as like mat, bat and mat, have similar mouth shapes. However, it's context is what helps lip-reading, Joon Son Chung from the university's Department of Engineering said. The system learns "things that come together, in this case the mouth shapes and the characters and what the likely upcoming characters are," explained Joon.

The title of Alex Garland's 2015 thoughtful psychological thriller Ex Machina derives its name from the ancient Greek phrase deus ex machina, meaning'god from the machine.' By omitting the deus from the film's title, it's clear Garland wants his audience to question both the roles of God and man. There's the godly referencing and positioning of Oscar Isaacs's secluded genius, Nathan, the creator of Ava, a robot with consciousness played by Alicia Vikander. And Ava's emotional existence itself goes against the idea of the natural in God, since she is a manmade creation. Meanwhile, the natural world of Ex Machina -- the trees that blend Nathan's perfectly rectangular home into the forest -- acts as a direct juxtaposition to the technological imagery that fills the rest of the film.

Bill Gates has floated the idea of taxing robots which replace human workers. He said it in an interview (here) with Quartz, a media outlet owned by The Atlantic, and staffed by journalists from The Economist, the New York Times and other publications that Dirty Donald would label as fake news. They made a nice short video (here) to promote the piece, with Gates giggling at the end about the idea of paying more taxes. It's a neat idea, and has got a lot of people online very excited. It could help to pay for Universal Basic Income, which is also very exciting to a lot of people online. And it could slow down the pace of cognitive automation, although that isn't an aspect he is majoring on.

The age of the bot has begun. We just have barely begun to notice. It's only been 10 years, and smartphones have fundamentally changed our world, the bot revolution will come quicker, and have an even greater impact on us. The bots cometh in all shapes and sizes, hardware and software, automations and AI and robot fried and foe. But most likely our most common interaction with them in the very near future will be in the form of messenger/personal assistant and customer service bots.

Tech giants are in a race to see who can build the most powerful voice-activated assistant, but there's a side effect that we haven't considered: Kids who grow up asking Amazon's Alexa questions or summoning Siri might lose some social skills. What if artificial intelligence changes the way we talk? Experts in robotics, machine learning, and AI descended on Austin for South by Southwest this week, and the biggest questions were lifted straight from the film Her. Is it changing the way we interact with each other? Will kids think they can order around their friends the same way they tell Alexa to tell them a joke?

His high school programming club was arguing about whether artificial intelligence could ever accomplish tasks better than humans. Barrat thought the answer was obvious. A few of his peers, however, weren't so easily convinced and asked for proof by the club's next meeting. "All of the sudden I had a week to make a neural network that could rap," Barrat said. Barrat's story is possible because Silicon Valley has decided AI is becoming indispensable, and big companies need to cultivate more talent to fill the growing demand--Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM and other giants like GE are shelling out multi-million dollar salaries for AI programmers. To upend the perceived shortage of talent, tech companies have begun to evangelize for open-source AI code, or software that's free to use, modify, and improve upon.

Artificial intelligence is shaping up as the next industrial revolution, poised to rapidly reinvent business, the global economy and how people work and interact with each other. Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Chinese internet giant Baidu Inc. and co-founder of education startup Coursera, and Neil Jacobstein, chair of the artificial intelligence and robotics department at Silicon Valley think tank Singularity University, sat down with The Wall Street Journal's Scott Austin to discuss AI's opportunities and challenges. What is Baidu focused on? NG: For large enterprises like Baidu, AI creates two big pockets of opportunities. One is our core business.