When aliens come, how will they get here? Well, unless they are sly infiltrators of the flesh, they will probably go for the kind of boastful, get-a-load-of-us craft that was immortalized by Douglas Adams in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." He wrote, "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." That was true of "Independence Day," and it is doubly true of "Arrival," in which a dozen mountainous ovoids--charcoal gray and rough to the touch, like a pumice stone--show up at various locations around Earth. Rather than land, the vessels suspend themselves in dignified fashion, with their tips facing downward and not quite touching the ground.

Social psychologists have long known that humans make snap judgments about each other based on nothing more than the way we look and, in particular, our faces. We use these judgments to determine whether a new acquaintance is trustworthy or clever or dominant or sociable or humorous and so on. These decisions may or may not be right and are by no means objective, but they are consistent. Given the same face in the same conditions, people tend to judge it in the same way. And that raises an interesting possibility.

Spill a glass of wine on the wooden floor at Abbey Road and the studio triggers an emergency procedure. In this, England's most storied recording venue, change is resisted at a molecular level – and not only because, in 2010, the government listed the building as a heritage site to ward off vampiric property developers. A few years ago, decorators varnished the floor of Studio Two, whose decor is somewhere between a 1950s prep school gym and a ballroom on the Titanic. The room's acoustic resonance, made famous on most of the Beatles' albums, had changed. The varnish was promptly chipped off, at vast expense.

Spacentrepreneur Elon Musk thinks we'll eventually need a basic universal income because of "automation." "People will have time to do other things, more complex things, more interesting things," he told CNBC. And then we gotta figure how we integrate with a world and future with a vast AI." "Ultimately, I think there has to be some improved symbiosis with digital super intelligence," the Tesla CEO said. What will happen if robots steal our jobs? It's a question that's been on the minds of both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie since the advent of artificial intelligence.

Marketing in the 2000s was dominated by search engine marketing and optimization (SEM and SEO). The early 2010s saw the rise of Facebook and social media marketing. Most recently, we've seen mobile marketing rise and plateau as users have stopped downloading new apps. Now, we are entering the era of messaging and chatbots. What is a "chatbot," you ask? Chatbots are computer programs that carry out conversations with people using a lightweight messaging app UI, language-based rules, or artificial intelligence.

Binary is the story of a man who must decide between saving his artificially intelligent girlfriend or a human woman during a crucial space voyage, causing him to question what love really means. Binary will be a 20-minute, live-action short film. Ryker - Loyal and naive, Ryker grew up in the working class. When he falls in love with an artificially intelligent woman, Seline, he struggles with whether to prioritize his love or his fellow human. Seline - An advanced form of artificial intelligence, appearing human, Seline has been programmed with the capacity to love. She must convince Ryker and Natalie her love is as valuable as human love.

Artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly, the ethics surrounding it are not. We are talking about an increasingly normal feature of life. When you talk with your smartphone or use Google Translate, you're using AI. What bothers scientists is the looming moment that AI starts making life or death decisions for us. LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE: When I say artificial intelligence, a lot of people think science fiction, like the famous scene in the film from "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Researchers from Princeton University received mass media attention when they recently predicted the demise of Facebook. Data scientists at Facebook soon hit back with their own'study:' "In keeping with the scientific principle (used by Princeton) 'correlation equals causation,' our research unequivocally demonstrated that Princeton may be in danger of disappearing entirely." Is it surprising that the original Princeton study found its way onto the front pages of newspapers and magazines across the world? Probably not – the fact is statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than non-causal information. What the data scientists at Princeton relied upon in presenting their paper was our individual human inability to think statistically.

When the potential of intelligent alien civilisations comes up in conversation, it's usually about the search. How will we find them? Are they there at all? What actions should we take if – or when – we find them, or they find us? Well, according to physicist Stephen Hawking, we should probably stop trying to contact them at all, because reaching out to advanced civilisations could put humanity and Earth in a pretty risky situation.

With WESTWORLD halfway through its first season, it has been well received by critics and audience alike. This HBO series is based on the 1973 film of the same name, which was written and directed by American novelist Michael Crichton, most known for his book JURASSIC PARK. The series is set in a place called Westworld, a technologically advanced, Western-themed park populated completely by synthetic androids called "hosts." The wealthy visitors, known as guests, come for adventure and indulge in everything the park has to offer. The guests are free to do whatever they want, be it murder, steal, rape or love.