Futurists and science fiction authors often give us overly grim visions of the future, especially when it comes to the Singularity and the risks of artificial superintelligence. Scifi novelist David Brin talked to us about why these dire predictions are often simplistic and unreasonable. Our civilisation faces no shortage of risks in the foreseeable future, from the devastating effects of climate change to the myriad number of technological hazards set to appear in the near future. Among these existential threats, perhaps none is more frightening than the prospect of artificial superintelligence. Its advent could knock us from our perch, forever delegating us to a secondary role, or worse, complete irrelevance.

These days, I feel as lucky as an EPA official emerging unscathed from a road trip through Logan County in a car plastered with "Hillary" stickers simply to continue having a job as a newspaper reporter. There are not a lot of employment opportunities for the 21st Century's equivalent of the town crier, especially if, like me, you are old, technology challenged and live in a state with an economy that's escaped do-not-resuscitate orders only because its Legislature can't agree on the wording. While Career Cast's 2016 Jobs Rated Report listed newspaper reporter as the worst job in America for the third consecutive year, thanks mainly to a -9 percent projected growth rate, high on-the-job stress and low pay, I still enjoy coming to work. It's a job that's rarely boring, always challenging, and puts me in contact with a cast of characters in an array of settings I would never encounter had I pursued the only other marketable skill I developed during my life -- hay baling. I'm also lucky to be working for a company that still considers its main purpose to be publishing a newspaper, albeit one with video, interactive and online components, and not, as the company formerly known as Tribune Publishing described itself in a press release last week, a "content curation and monetization company focused on creating and distributing premium, verified content across all channels."

Jeff Bezos spoke this week at Recode's Code Conference in California about the "gigantic" potential of artificial intelligence. Pressed by moderator Walt Mossberg to speculate on where this technology is headed and what it means, Bezos went so far as to say that we may be on the "edge of a golden era". Were it not real life I'd have sworn I was watching the opening scene of a sci-fi horror film, complete with scary technology (AI), calming platitudes ("humans are much more efficient") and sinister villain (guess who). Contrary to the titillating trailer, however, I think the future of artificial intelligence, at least as far as supply chain strategists are concerned, is bright, and that Bezos is our friend. Amazon reportedly employs 1,000 people in artificial intelligence.

This isn't the first piece of music composed by a computer. But it's a moment that might one day be called "watershed." It might also be called "the beginning of the end." Google unveiled its Magenta program at Moogfest. The program, part of the deep learning Google Brain project, will use Google's open-source artificial intelligence platform TensorFlow to research machine learning in artistic creation, i.e. have a machine write a song.

Over the last 10 years, Artificial Intelligence has ascended from a catch phrase to technology, converted to platforms and now used in business services and robotics. You may have heard of Watson Dominated Jeopardy, Siri, Cortana, or even Jarvis from The Iron Man. These are all real applications you can expect to have major impact on our lives in the very near future, if not already. So, what is Artificial Intelligence and how does it work? In short, it's the design and development of computer system that inherits human's decision making abilities and able to perform tasks through visual, speech and cognitive decision making.

Kevin Kelly knows technology can't be stopped. Of course, artificial intelligence will wipe out or rework whole industries, and entire career paths will vanish. And if you think the world is addicted to its phones now, just wait until there's a screen everywhere, and you never really escape the grid. We will be tracked like never before. While this may sound like the recipe for a Tom Cruise dystopia sci-fi movie, it doesn't have to be. In fact, in his new book, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, Kelly goes to great pains to make it all seem like a net positive.

Michelangelo's'Creation of Adam' as seen through Google's Deep Dream Created by digital artist Kyle McDonald using Google's Deep Dream program. In the summer of 2015, researchers at Google realized they could make their artificial intelligence algorithms dream. They set the programs to not just classify images, but enhance what they saw. The machines showed their interpretation of art. The researchers found they could also set the programs to generate images, giving an idea of how the machine thought certain objects looked.

Well, that sure got weird, didn't it? Tribune's takeover of what used to be called Times-Mirror was messy when it started, a decade and a half ago, and has gotten worse every few years: This is the company, after all, that took over several great newspapers, crowed about "synergy," and made a few legendary editors so uncomfortable that they left their posts. And they sold their papers to Sam Zell, who had no background in newspapers and made an even bigger mess of things before filing for Chapter 11. Last fall, the company put Tribune Tower, where its original newspaper is based, up for sale. But now Tribune has a new trick: It has renamed itself tronc – a term that means, in French, "poor box," and if modulated to "trunk," something worse. According to Tribune's current chair, Michael Ferro – who was invited onto the board by former CEO Jack Griffin, whom he fired -- this is a bold step into the future.

Data scientists are always stressing over the "best" approach to variable selection, particularly when faced with massive amounts of information, a not uncommon occurrence these days. "Massive" by today's standards means terabytes of data and tens, if not hundreds, of millions of features or predictors. There are many reasons for this but the reality is that there a single, canonical answer does not exist. There are as many approaches as there are statisticians since every statistician and their sibling has a POV or a paper on the subject. For years, there have been rumors that Google uses all available features in building its predictive algorithms.

Going by the website, Project Magenta is Google's attempt to explore whether artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can be used "to create compelling art and music". While AI has long been used for things like speech and image recognition, Project Magenta is Google's attempt to use AI to create instead. According to Magenta scientist Douglas Eck's blog post, "[Google's]developing algorithms that can learn how to generate art and music, potentially creating compelling and artistic content on their own."