The focus of Mark Cuban's Q&A at South by Southwest was supposed to be about government disruption, and he was supposed to hype up the Austin-based insurance company The Zebra, one of his newest investments. But Cuban, everyone's favorite love-to-hate billionaire entrepreneur and Shark Tank star, had a few other topics in mind. You might say that the charismatic Cuban disrupted his own session. Here are the five standout anecdotes, stories, and lessons he decided to share. Cuban hates when people compare him to President Trump, but it's easy to see why they do--they are both wealthy businessmen with reality TV shows.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla was recently quoted saying: "There will be fewer and fewer jobs a robot cannot do better." In his impassioned speech he asked what meaning humans will have without jobs. This follows others including Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, who have made comments on the dangers of robotics and AI "destroying jobs". Musk argued that if humans want to add value, they should embrace a "merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence". Although this might sound like a sci-fi movie in the works, Musk's suggestions really do extend to the symbiosis of man and machine.

Countersurveillance fashion designs are being spotlighted at this year's South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, by a group of young women of color who started a company called Hyphen-Labs. Carmen Aguilar y Wedge is the co-founder and director of creative technology for Hyphen-Labs. She modeled the company's ScatterViz visor at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Carmen Aguilar y Wedge is the co-founder and director of creative technology for Hyphen-Labs. She modeled the company's ScatterViz visor at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

Baidu, the Chinese company operating a search engine, a mobile browser, and other web services, is announcing today the launch of SwiftScribe, a web app that's meant to help people transcribe audio recordings more quickly, using -- you guessed it! Baidu in the past few years has been honing its DeepSpeech software for speech recognition. Last year, the company introduced TalkType, an Android keyboard that, using DeepSpeech, puts speech input first and typing second, based on the idea that you can enter information more quickly when you say it than when you peck. Now Baidu is coming out with another app enhanced with DeepSpeech, one that could arguably find better footing in a professional setting. Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have all been working on speech recognition right alongside Baidu, but none of those four has come up with something aimed at longer-form transcription.

You're awake, you're sentient, you might even be upright. You're not comatose or dead, and it's reasonable to assume that if you were on some kind of powerful mind-altering drug then you wouldn't be reading this. The point is, you're here, and you're alive, so therefore you're conscious. OK then, since you're conscious and I'm conscious and everyone else is conscious, go ahead. Does it belong to the mind or the body, or does it exist outside both? Is consciousness part of our souls, or does it live in the things we create – our art, our music, our cities and wars? Could it be mechanical or electronic, and, if so, what makes it operate? Most pressingly of all, is it possible we have now made for ourselves a new kind of consciousness, one which exists independently? If so, then what the hell have we got ourselves into? The search for a definition of consciousness must lay claim to be the world's longest-running detective story. We've had our best minds on it ever since we developed brains big enough to ask questions and, still, we seem to be stumped. Plato and Aristotle couldn't fix it; Kant, Hume and Locke tried different angles; Schroedinger, Heisenberg and Einstein remained in awe before it. None of them came up with the final formula, the definitive, nailed-it for ever, silences-all-critics answer. Lately though, the hunt seems to have changed gear. Despite big differences about how best to conduct the search and where to look, several of the most persistent sleuths have found themselves disconcertingly close to agreement. No-one is yet at the stage when they are ready to call a press conference and announce to the world they have finally apprehended the suspect, but they have at least begun to converge on these two leads: the Omega Point and the Singularity. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is an improbable prophet, partly because he's dead, and partly because he's still associated with a famous palaeontological fraud.

Our social media guy David Dhannoo remains in Africa, following on from his article last week about the rise of FinTech on the continent. Dave's technology in Africa series now looks at how a startup in Southern Africa is using artificial intelligence to source news articles. Controvert Media from Zimbabwe has implemented the use of artificial intelligence to automatically write and post news articles. They caught my attention from when they trialled their AI idea at the recent African Cup of Nations which took place Gabon. The startup used an AI bot that puts together basic reports on final match reports, taking into account the match scores, player performance data, and so on.

Let me also mention some of the advances in my main area of expertise: Recommender Systems. Of course, Deep Learning has also impacted this area. While I would still not recommend DL as the default approach to recommender systems, it is interesting to see how it is already being used in practice, and in large scale, by products like Youtube. That said, there has been engaging research in the area that is not related to Deep Learning. The best paper award in this year's ACM Recsys went to "Local Item-Item Models For Top-N Recommendation," an interesting extension to Sparse Linear Methods (i.e.

Google's original motto, "Don't Be Evil," will be severely tested in the coming years For many years artificial intelligence has been hyped as the world's next big groundbreaking technology. But till recently, the closest we've got to seeing AI in action was on the big screen. From evil computer HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, to Scarlett Johansson's breathless AI in Her, there's been a rich tradition of artificial intelligence in the movies. Now, thanks to several recent innovations, AI has become a reality in our daily lives. You may not even be aware of it, but whenever you use Google, Facebook, or Amazon Echo, you're using AI.

Perhaps in the future, artificial intelligence will intervene and write this article. Perhaps in the future, the editorial team will become redundant and ARN will embrace a form a robo-journalism. Perhaps in the future, it even won't matter, because the entire channel will also be unemployed. And what a different world it would be. For the rise of AI - as the world likes to categorise it - is storming along like a tech freight train, charging through barriers and racing towards a new world. Within this new world, will naturally be new ways to engage, conduct business and make money, creating opportunities and challenges for the channel in parallel.

How can people learn to work better with robots? First, have them watch robots on the silver screen. That's the finding of a recent study that had 56 undergraduate students rate their feelings toward humanlike service robots. Half of the group watched the science-fiction movie "Robot and Frank," which involved a robot, and the other half watched "Safety Not Guaranteed," a sci-fi romantic comedy that didn't involve robots, before they made their decision. The result: Those who viewed the movie with the robot were more likely to say that they would buy humanoid robots that assist the elderly.