In 2013, Alistair Shepherd asked everyone in a business-school pitch competition to complete a survey with questions inspired by online-dating sites. It asked things like "Do you like horror movies?" and "Do spelling mistakes annoy you?" Shepherd predicted how well the eight teams would collaborate internally and how they would ultimately fare. He ended up ranking all eight correctly. What made for a great team? Those in which people had the most tolerance for their teammates' perspectives--and those in which people had the greatest diversity in personalities. Mr. Shepherd's experiment represents an attempt to get beyond the usual approach to workplace chemistry.

In 2015, ad agency McCann Japan's creative planner Shun Matsuzaka set himself a task he called the "creative genome project": he wanted to create the world's first AI creative director, capable of directing a TV commercial. And last week, Matsuzaka showed off his creation at the UK advertiser trade body ISBA's annual conference in London. The creative brief: The type of brand, the campaign goal, the target audience, and the claim the ad should make. Confectionery giant Mondelez was the first client willing to put the AI creative director to the test. McCann pitted the robot against human creative director Mitsuru Kuramoto to create an ad for Clorets Mint Tab that conveyed the message: "Instant-effect fresh breath that lasts for 10 minutes."

Don't expect to watch "Mr. While the past two seasons were given June and July release dates, the third season will not be shown on USA Network until fall. Robot" Season 3 will premiere in October. Unlike the summer, the fall is packed with new TV shows. USA Network obviously trusts that the hacker drama's dedicated fan base will stick with it.

In 2015, ad agency McCann Japan's creative planner Shun Matsuzaka set himself a task he called the "creative genome project": he wanted to create the world's first AI creative director, capable of directing a TV commercial. And last week, Matsuzaka showed off his creation at the UK advertiser trade body ISBA's annual conference in London. The creative brief: The type of brand, the campaign goal, the target audience, and the claim the ad should make. They then assembled a database of deconstructed ads from all the winners of some of Japan's biggest award shows from the past 10 years -- mapping and tagging each of the elements of the ads to help determine what made them successful. Confectionery giant Mondelez was the first client willing to put the AI creative director to the test.

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has said the impact of fake news is increasingly concerning and unveiled plans to tackle "unethical" political advertising and the harvesting of data. The British computer scientist said, exactly 28 years after his invention, three new trends have become alarming in the last year. In an open letter, the 61-year-old said misuse of data has created a "chilling effect on free speech" and warned of "internet blind spots" that are corrupting democracy. One problem, he wrote, is that most people find their news and information through a "handful" of social media sites and search engines, which are paid whenever someone clicks a link. "The net result is that these sites show us content they think we'll click on -- meaning that misinformation, or fake news, which is surprising, shocking, or designed to appeal to our biases, can spread like wildfire," he said.

I only got a "smart" television set 18 months ago, so I have already avoided years of covert surveillance by the CIA, the FBI, MI5, CI5 and NWA. No one is safe from Samsung's all-seeing Eye of Sauron. Apparently, a deeply embedded program currently enables the intelligence agencies to note and monitor anyone who is watching ITV's The Nightly Show, in the belief that they must be a weird loner-misfit, inexplicably fascinated by human suffering, a ticking social time bomb just waiting to explode. I am a late adopter of new technology. If I had played the ape at the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I would have thrown the bone up in the air, and then Stanley Kubrick would have cut, not to a similarly shaped satellite swooping through the cosmos in the far future, but to me, some years later, still throwing the bone up in the air, and obstinately refusing banana-based inducements to upgrade to a more aerodynamic bone.

Over the weekend, I put a question to the Google Home speaker I'd brought back from the United States. "Is Obama planning a coup?" I'd asked this after reading an article that suggested a relatively new feature that gives answers - or Snippets as the search company call them - to queries, rather than just links, had been producing some troubling results. The piece said a search asking which US presidents were in the Ku Klux Klan had listed several as members of the KKK, despite there being no evidence for that. It also featured a search for "Proposition 63", a gun control measure, that had produced a Snippet describing it as "a deceptive ballot initiative that will criminalise millions of law abiding Californians". And then there was "Is Obama planning a coup?" which had resulted in a Snippets box describing "Western Center for Journalism's exclusive video".

As the tug of war between humans and machines escalates, we've become witnesses on nearly a daily basis to events that suggest there won't be an ultimate winner or loser in this existential battle for survival and supremacy. Just take two little human mistakes that recently received worldwide attention because of the power of today's technology to magnify their impacts on a global scale. The first was the mistake made by a senior partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, who was assigned to hand an envelope to an actor tasked to announce the best picture of the year. This is a task that has been performed flawlessly for decades. It is a job that has been practiced so often that a structured protocol has been established to ensure that it is handled seamlessly.

As the audience filed out of Austin's Paramount Theater following the South by Southwest opening night screening of Terrence Malick's "Song to Song," there was a line around the block waiting to get in for a screening of Ridley Scott's 1979 film "Alien," along with footage from Scott's upcoming "Alien: Covenant." Opening on May 19, the film is the sixth in the series and the third directed by Scott. Scott first took to the stage to introduce the footage from the new film, telling the ecstatic crowd, "My goals haven't changed. My mantra has always been to scare the living … out of you." And with that there were three scenes shown from the new film.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.