As expected, Apple previewed iOS 10 at this week's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. And as expected, upgrades to Apple's Siri digital assistant dominated the presentation. In a bid to compete against rivals such as Google and Amazon that are making hard pushes into the artificial-intelligence realm, Apple has opened Siri's API to third-party developers, potentially boosting its functionality. Uber and WhatsApp are early partners in this effort--if you ever wanted to order a cab or send a text massage to a friend via voice command, your chance is coming soon. On the desktop, Siri can help you send messages, find files, and execute some background tasks.)

PRO: Chris Bishop, director of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, said earlier this year that he believes the hyperbole around the AI risks could jeopardise any future developments that may in fact assist humanity. "Any scenario in which AI is an existential threat to humanity is not just around the corner," he told the Guardian. Referring to the views of high-profile cynics like professor Stephen Hawking, Bishop said: "I think they must be talking decades away for those comments to make any sense. Right now we are in control of that technology and we can make lots of choices about the paths that we follow." Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for AI and professor of computer science at the University of Washington, meanwhile says the popular dystopian vision of AI is wrong because it "equates intelligence with autonomy".

From Ex Machina to Terminator, artificial intelligence has long been a subject for film-makers. But what if AI could actually make a movie? At the Cannes Lions advertising festival on Thursday morning, an audience was shown a series of short films in the annual New Directors Showcase, which highlights emerging talent. A few days ago, I saw Eclipse, a pop video featuring a French band, at the offices of Saatchi and Saatchi, which runs the Cannes showcase and commissioned the AI entry. What is remarkable about it is not the production values - it is actually a rather dull piece of work - but a process that involved AI at every stage.

On the surface, Apple TV seems increasingly focused on cable subscribers instead of cord cutters. Since its launch last fall, the fourth-generation Apple TV has added several features that provide more convenient access to "TV Everywhere" apps (such as WatchESPN, FX Now, and HBO Go) that require a cable or satellite login to access. Siri is becoming more effective at finding what you want from these channels; the download process is becoming more streamlined; and with the next version of Apple's tvOS software, logging into these apps will become much less of a hassle. While these are useful improvements, it's hard to believe cable subservience is Apple's true goal. For a device that's supposedly the "future of television," its best features are becoming awfully dependent on a cable subscription, which in turn requires a cable box.

On June 28, Brian Eno will launch a new video experience for the title track of his latest album The Ship, which was released in April. What's different about this music video is, according to Eno, it isn't really a music video at all, but rather a visual experience informed by and created with artificial intelligence. "Just as I'm excited about the possibilities of artificial intelligence and new technologies, I'm so incredibly and numbingly bored with videos and the traditional music videos, that I just couldn't imagine wanting to do that," said Eno, on stage at Cannes Lions. "So really, this is an attempt to say, is there some other way we can do this thing?" The legendary artist and producer said that he's interested in finding out what new technologies can do, primarily because they so often can do something nobody ever thought they could do.

SoundCloud is built for discovery; for the magic moment when you're blown away by an artist you've never heard before. Connecting listeners to new artists and artists to new listeners is what we do. Today we're excited to announce that we've started rolling out our newest discovery feature, Suggested Tracks, across all SoundCloud platforms. It uses your listening activity to automatically find new tracks and artists – ones that you've likely never heard before, but are similar to the things you already know and love. And with 125 million tracks and counting on SoundCloud, there's always more to discover.

A big challenge in algorithmic composition is to devise a model that is both easily trainable and able to reproduce the long-range temporal dependencies typical of music. Here we investigate how artificial neural networks can be trained on a large corpus of melodies and turned into automated music composers able to generate new melodies coherent with the style they have been trained on. We employ gated recurrent unit networks that have been shown to be particularly efficient in learning complex sequential activations with arbitrary long time lags. Our model processes rhythm and melody in parallel while modeling the relation between these two features. Using such an approach, we were able to generate interesting complete melodies or suggest possible continuations of a melody fragment that is coherent with the characteristics of the fragment itself.

If you're a child of the '80s like me, you might recognize this famous line from the movie WarGames. This innocent-sounding question comes not from one of the movie's human stars, but from a military super-computer named Joshua, after a bored high school student, played by Matthew Broderick, accesses the computer's hard drive. Thinking he's hacked into a video game company, Broderick's character accepts Joshua's challenge and chooses the most intriguing game he can find: global thermonuclear war. Joshua is an intelligent computer programmed to learn through simulations like the one Broderick's character initiates. And because the computer actually does control the arsenal of U.S. nuclear weapons, it's a "game" that puts the planet on the brink of World War III.

Nearly every music streaming service has a feature that gives you new music to listen to based on audio habit. Spotify has Discover Weekly, Pandora compiles a custom station and Apple Music is making recommendations a big part of its redesign for iOS 10. SoundCloud is looking to offer a similar tool with its new Suggested Tracks section. The company says the picks come from its "state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm" that keeps tabs on your likes and plays on the web and through the mobile apps. While SoundCloud doesn't specify how often the list is updated ("frequently"), it did explain that there's a good chance the some of the new music won't be found on any other service.

The Television Critics Assn. is a media organization consisting of 200 professional TV critics and journalists from the United States and Canada. The awards will be held Aug. VidCon, the annual video star convention, has gotten so big it's expanding globally