Whilst I can't fully refute either scenario, I can speculate on the potential for near-future political applications of AI which have the potential to be both disruptive and unintuitively desirable. Automatic, near-instant, ubiquitous fact checking UK fact-checking organisation Full Fact recently released a report that covered the state of various fact checking technologies in use and in development. It covered areas like overall existing semantic data standards in use and their challenges, and trends seem to be that natural language and contextual language recognition is going from strength to strength. The techniques in play include quickly responding to previously debunked claims, data mining statistics on demand and drawing confidence-based correlations from less reliable but plentiful data like news and social media reports. The convergent goal of these various projects appears to be moving fact checking from a post-hoc arm-chair analyst world, to a force that for example, in the middle of a debate or news report, is avalible to instantly challenge, rate or question any given factual statement within seconds of it being said.

Developed by Angelo Semeraro, Coralie Gourguechon, and Monica Lanaro of the Italian communication research center Fabrica, in partnership with a team of AI specialists at the French company Jolibrain, Recognition is only the latest project to explore how artificial intelligence can change the way humans look at images. So far, the value of robots' contributions to human understanding of art doesn't often go beyond novelty -- take Microsoft's emotion-detecting app, which deemed the Mona Lisa 43% happy, for example. But with Recognition, a robot inadvertently creates subjective meaning with its pairings, and starts to seem like a shrewd commentator. A recent Reuters photograph of a Singapore airport's control tower alongside a bustling construction site paired with "Industrial Landscape" (1955) by L.S. Lowry, for instance, seems like a comment on the relentlessness of industrial development.

In a variety of application domains the content to be recommended to users is associated with text. This includes research papers, movies with associated plot summaries, news articles, blog posts, etc. Recommendation approaches based on latent factor models can be extended naturally to leverage text by employing an explicit mapping from text to factors. This enables recommendations for new, unseen content, and may generalize better, since the factors for all items are produced by a compactly-parametrized model. Previous work has used topic models or averages of word embeddings for this mapping. In this paper we present a method leveraging deep recurrent neural networks to encode the text sequence into a latent vector, specifically gated recurrent units (GRUs) trained end-to-end on the collaborative filtering task. For the task of scientific paper recommendation, this yields models with significantly higher accuracy. In cold-start scenarios, we beat the previous state-of-the-art, all of which ignore word order. Performance is further improved by multi-task learning, where the text encoder network is trained for a combination of content recommendation and item metadata prediction. This regularizes the collaborative filtering model, ameliorating the problem of sparsity of the observed rating matrix.

The new Sling TV app looks a lot like a slightly tweaked version of its Summer redesign. The content-centric UI still features a My TV section, with the ability to resume watching paused shows, and the more convenient browsing interface, but navigation has been moved to the left side feel more natural to Windows users. Live Tiles, Cortana voice search and touch compatibility for tablets are also baked in. Sling TV says it will continue to support it's legacy desktop app for users on older platforms and those who simply don't wish to use the Windows Store. Sadly, that application isn't getting a visual overhaul: It's stuck with the same interface the service launched with over a year ago.

When Apple unveiled the seventh iteration of the iPhone yesterday, it made sure to play up the camera. After all, the company has a small army working on the iPhone's ability to take photos. The device's camera is also often touted as one of its most cherished features, keeping Apple's smartphone ahead of the competition. Yet in recent years, competition from Samsung and others has caught up to Apple's imaging lead. The newest Apple devices, the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, are naturally more capable in the photo department than their predecessors.

We get the science fiction we need at the time we need it. When "Star Trek" premiered on Sept. 8, 1966, the United States was escalating its involvement in the Vietnam War while also reckoning with the civil rights movement -- not to mention waging a cold war with the Soviet Union that seemed always on the verge of heating up. Right along with that tumult was the beacon of scientific hope that was NASA's space program, which in turn stoked the passion of an America obsessed with tomorrow. World's fairs were in the business of showing us the cars, kitchens and cities of tomorrow. Writer-producer Gene Roddenberry channeled those twin poles of the human condition -- strife and hope -- into "Star Trek," the show he pitched to NBC as " 'Wagon Train' to the stars."

Just the title of Tom Gauld's new book suggests action and adventure, lunar style: "Mooncop! But the reality is something altogether different. The graphic novel is actually far more subtle, amusing, and haunting than its title suggests. Inspired by old-school toys and Star Wars, it comes complete with both fun, pathos, and wonderful art. Here are five reasons this graphic novel will be your new favorite thing. Despite the jokes--and it is a very funny book--Mooncop has a particular melancholy to it, reflecting its creator's feeling about the way scientific exploration has fallen out of favor with the general public. "When I look back at the years of the Space Race it feels as though there was such an optimistic wonder about space, the moon, and generally about how technology would improve everyone's life," Gauld explains. "Amazing things are still happening in science, but I feel there isn't the same unreserved positivity about it." While the title suggests a police force on some Blade Runner-esque off-world outpost, the actual physical inspiration for Mooncop was far more quaint. "The idea of a cop on the moon came from a 1960s tin toy I saw, which was a car with'Space Patrol' on the side and a robot driver in a glass dome wielding a laser cannon," Gauld says. "The packaging showed the car on a deserted moon, with the Earth in the black sky above.

The act of artificially intelligent beings taking over complex tasks typically reserved for human hands is no longer a fantasy of Hollywood fiction. In collaboration with 20th Century Fox, scientists at IBM Research have created the first-ever "cognitive movie trailer" for the upcoming science fiction thriller Morgan by utilizing experimental Watson application program interfaces -- in simpler terms, they used a complicated technological system which analyzed hundreds of horror movie trailers to gather information on scenes that keep audiences on-edge. After sifting through Morgan's finished cut, the program selected its 10 most appealing moments, which a (human) editor then crafted into a trailer for the movie. Directed by Ridley Scott's son, Luke, and starring Kate Mara, Paul Giamatti, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michelle Yeoh, and Brian Cox, Morgan revolves around a risk-management consultant who must decide whether to terminate a self-sufficient, humanesque robot after it grows increasingly hostile. In July, Greenlight Essentials' Jack Zhang released a sneak peek at his new project, Impossible Things, an indie horror flick he wrote with help from an augmented intelligence software tool, which also crafted the film's trailer.

Kimera Systems Inc. announced its Nigel artificial general intelligence (AGI) technology became a commercially deployable artificial intelligence technology to observe user behavior, comprehend context, and derive a common sense set of actions to apply under specific circumstances. Nigel was able to observe that a movie theater is a type of location, and that people share common behaviors with respect to their phones when they visit this type of location. Through these observations, Nigel learned to proactively dim screens and silence smartphones when people enter a cinema. As an artificial general intelligence technology, Nigel represents a new approach that fuses together a broad range of hard and soft sensor data, resulting in continuous observation, moment-to-moment contextual awareness and soon, complete comprehension.

"Star Trek" first took viewers on a voyage to the Final Frontier 50 years ago on Sept. 8, 1966. That's when the original television show aired on NBC, introducing pop culture to a crew that would become iconic over the following half-century. But "Star Trek's" vision of the future didn't just inspire adoration for the swashbuckling Captain James T. Kirk or his logically inclined first officer, Spock. It also helped spur innovators to create technologies that have changed the way people live in the real world. Here are a few examples of the "Star Trek" tech that's now reality.