Advancement in computers and technology have been incredibly positive for music creators around the globe. You can learn how to produce music on YouTube, purchase the same sample libraries as your favorite composers and create epic scores from your laptop, anywhere in the world. As a result, there are more music producers than ever. Computers helping humans create original music has become today's standard, but there are several companies looking to turn the tables on this process. Computer-generated songs are a fast-growing sector of the industry, looking to disrupt creation, licensing and access for musicians and non-musicians alike.

Futurist (and current director of engineering at Google) Ray Kurzweil has made a lot of predictions about the future--and many of them have come true. In his 1990 book "The Age of Intelligent Machines," Kurzweil foresaw things like the Internet's fast and widespread adoption, wearable devices, the cloud, and artificial intelligence being able to beat the world's best chess players by 2000. Overall, Kurzweil claims to have an 86 percent accuracy rate on his predictions from that book. Kurzweil's daughter, Amy, is a cartoonist and children's book author, and the two shared a stage at South by Southwest on March 13 to discuss the future of art, storytelling, and creativity in general. Here are four predictions the elder Kurzweil made about where those things are going.

Stephen Hawking, widely considered to be the most accomplished theoretical physicist in the entire world has made no secret of his fears that the technology behind artificial intelligence is developing faster than human beings can keep up with, and could eventually lead to a destruction of the human race. Now he has proposed a solution to this terrifying potential problem although he believes the solution could prove to be an even greater threat to the world. Speaking to The Times, Professor Hawking explained his fears about the threat posed by artificial intelligence. "Since civilization began, aggression has been useful since it has definite survival advantages, " he said, "It is hard-wired into our genes by Darwinian evolution. Now, however, technology has advanced at such a pace that this aggression may destroy us all by nuclear or biological war. We need to control this inherited instinct by our logic and reason."

This story appeared in the March 15, 2017 issue of Level Up by Forbes newsletter. Netflix led the rise of streaming; now it wants to drive interactive-watching technology. In this realm, viewers will get to choose a TV show's plot events, such as whether an Orange Is The New Black inmate chooses to join or steer clear of a gang. Cast and crew will have written and filmed multiple options, allowing fans to curate their own watching experience. The "Choose Your Own Adventure" experiment will begin later this year with a children's show, simpler to produce than the adult content that would come later, writes Forbes contributor Dana Feldman.

Trading and broking firms line up each floor of the 29-storeyed BSE building. Located on the Dalal Street, the building is also one of the tallest in'South Bombay.' A typical trading shop looks like a small cabin area housing 4 to 5 desks with computers. During market hours, traders can be seen glued to the computer monitors and TV. However, there is something happening on the 18th floor of the building which could impact the jobs of these trading houses.

When Judy Norman walks on stage for the play'Spillikin', she performs beside a somewhat different cast member - a humanoid robot. The robot can talk, make facial expressions, blink its eyes, move its hand and turn its head. It has even been described as'affectionate' by leading lady Norman, who works closely with the robot throughout the performance. When Judy Norman (right) walks on stage for the play'Spillikin', she performs beside a somewhat different cast member - a humanoid robot (left). RoboThespian is the creation of Cornish engineer Will Jackson who had an idea to develop an artistic robot that could react with its audiences. Six years ago he embarked on a project to create a robot that would save tour guides from tediously repeating the same script each day.

One of Google Home's biggest strengths is its ability to fill our homes with music on command. All we need to do is say, "OK Google, play Shape of You," and it will dutifully comply, but if you don't know what you're in the mood to hear, the boundless options can be overwhelming. A new feature in the Google Home app is looking to help make it easier. Joining Watch and Discover, there's a new Listen tab in the Google Home app that is dedicated to finding just the right music at just the right time. As Google describes, the new section "shows you curated lists of ready-to-stream, personalized albums and playlists from your favorite music apps, like YouTube, Google Play Music, and Spotify. You'll also find compatible music and audio apps you already have on your phone or tablet, as well as a section to discover new apps to download."

Facebook is finally adding Stories to its news feed, completing its project to steal Snapchat's most famous picture. The company had already added the feature to the rest of its other apps, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. But the addition to the Facebook news feed is the biggest of all of those changes, shaking up the way that the app works entirely. At the top of the news feed, instead of the posts or the status update box, users will now see a series of circles with their friends faces in them. It will work the exact same as Instagram stories, which was added to the app last summer, and has gone on to become as big as Snapchat itself and taken many of the smaller app's most popular users. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Google is using a 10,000-strong army of independent contractors to flag "offensive or upsetting" content, in order to ensure that queries like "did the Holocaust happen" don't push users to misinformation, propaganda and hate speech. The review of search terms is being done by the company's "quality raters", a little-known corps of worldwide contractors that Google uses to assess the quality of its systems. The raters are given searches based on real queries to conduct, and are asked to score the results on whether they meet the needs of users. These contractors, introduced to the company's review process in 2013, work from a huge manual describing every potential problem they could find with a given search query: whether or not it meets the user's expectations, whether the result offered is low or high quality, and whether it's spam, porn or illegal. In a new update to the rating system, rolled out on Tuesday, Google introduced another flag raters could use: the "upsetting-offensive" mark.

When Avaya Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Jan. 19 it represented a sad end to the $8.2 billion buyout of the Santa Clara, Calif. But it was hardly unique in Silicon Valley. Venture capitalists who once considered an unthinkable breach of decorum to put a company in bankruptcy now see it as a way to salvage what they can from their would-be unicorns. While most tech startups consist of little more than leased office space, some yoga balls and a bunch of promising ideas, their intellectual property can generate hard cash in an auction. As old-line photography company Kodak demonstrated in 2012 when it sold a portfolio of patents to groups led by Intellectual Ventures for $525 million, even a dead company might have valuable assets hiding in its files. "It really exploded after the Kodak bankruptcy," said Jeffrey Cohen, a partner with Lowenstein Sandler who as a Cooley LLC partner handled the two-year-long bankruptcy of Quirky, a crowdsourcing site for inventors that consumed $175 million in VC money before it failed.