One of Google's latest projects is the Magenta project, an effort to generate music, video and images using machine intelligence. The big question Project Magenta tries to answer is, "Can machines make music and art?" If this is possible, the Google team wants to learn how, and if it cannot, they want to know why. Douglas Eck, one of the research scientists working on Magenta, wrote that before Magenta, he worked on music search and recommendation for Google Play Music. His goal in this area was to "use machine learning and an audio signal processing to help listeners find the music they want when they want it."

I recently wrote a blog post about artificial intelligence in the auditing industry and shared my predictions on which industries I expect to adopt AI next. The short answer was: all of them. I also suggested that adoption might be happening sooner that anyone previously thought, thanks to an announcement from Facebook last month. If you followed news from Facebook's F8 developer conference, which took place in April, you might be asking, "What's a chat bot?" It's essentially a computer program designed to simulate conversation with a user, and Facebook generated some buzz around the launch of its bots for Messenger platform, which has already signed on companies like CNN, Salesforce and Staples. But, at its core, a chat bot is also a form of artificial intelligence, and the mainstream adoption of them will in turn drive the mainstream adoption of AI.

Google is launching a new project to see whether artificial intelligence can create art. In a talk at Moogfest, a US technology festival, Google researcher Douglas Eck described a project that would seek to understand whether or not a computer can create art. Magenta, which will launch in early June, is part of Google Brain, the company's deep learning research. Eck said the project was in part inspired by DeepDream, an artificial intelligent system trained to find patterns in pictures. "There's a couple of things that got me wanting to form Magenta, and one of them was seeing the completely, frankly, astonishing improvements in the state of the art. And I wanted to demystify this a little bit," said Eck. "The question Magenta asks is, 'Can machines make music and art? If not, why not?'," he said.

The past few years have seen machine learning emerge as one of the trendiest topics within the technology sector as it allows computers to find hidden insights from the volumes of data being collected without being explicitly programmed where to look. The resources available to process it have increased dramatically. One of the exciting aspects about machine learning is that its applications are virtually endless and in fact it has been transforming a wide variety of industries in interesting ways. In this post, I would like to share my experience using machine learning algorithms, in particular how we, at Capgemini, have developed the capabilities to successfully integrate machine learning-based technology into a framework to help improve service delivery in the public sector. Many machine learning applications are all around us: Amazon and Netflix online recommendation systems, Spotify and Pandora's personalised playlists, Facebook's automatic face recognition and friends recommendations, Google's personalised searches and adds, Uber's prediction of customer demand and pre-location of cars, to mention just a few.

Anybody that's been paying attention to tech and the jobs market in the last couple of years has been paying attention to automation, and anybody paying attention to automation has seen this video by CGP Grey: There's a quiet rumbling on the Internet as slowly, people are starting to worry about the future of labor, debating whether mass technological unemployment is the true blue fate of humanity or just another Y2K scare. For those in-the-know, it seems pretty certain that automation will replace jobs, but the degree to which humans will be fiscally displaced, however, is up for debate. Bloggers, writers, and other creatives will argue against there ever being machines that can do their jobs and create pieces better, with more soul, if you will, than a human can. Unfortunately, those poor folks are in for a rude awakening; the machines have already begun to blog. In the U.S. in 2014, 720 bicyclists, 4,400 pedestrians, and 33,000 drivers died in auto accidents.

Can machines ever produce creative works to rival our own creations? Google is hoping to find out in its latest project aimed at teaching artificial intelligent how to generate music and art. Dubbed Magenta, the project was created in Google's Brain AI group, which is also responsible for Google Translate, Photos and Inbox. Google wants to use Tensortflow software to teach machines how to compose music and create works of art. DeepDream, Google's visual AI that could transform photos into psychedelic art (such as Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory, pictured), worked on a similar principle Google currently uses TensorFlow for speech recognition in the Google app, Smart Reply in Inbox and to search in Google Photos.

The scenarios sound like they belong to the plot of a science fiction film. From'enslaving mankind' to'destroying the universe', a checklist of worst case outcomes for AI has been created to help safeguard humanity against disaster. The list was drawn up by computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy and entrepreneur Federico Pistono – and they say, as far-fetched as they may sound, we need to take the threats seriously. The list of how AI could turn evil was drawn up by computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy and entrepreneur Federico Pistono – and they say, as far-fetched as they may sound, we need to take the threats seriously. Pictured is a scene from the 2015 film, 'Terminator: Genisys' This can be accomplished through forced cryonics or concentration camps.

Google's new artificial intelligence (AI) software will be able to produce original music and art. The search giant's new project, named Magenta, is due for public launch at the start of June, but was unveiled at the Moogfest art and technology festival by Douglas Eck, a researcher from the company's Google Brain AI division. As Quartz reports, Magenta was inspired by DeepDream, a product Google released last year which could turn the most ordinary of images into a trippy, surreal hellscape. DeepDream is an image recognising software turned up to 11. Google trains its computers to describe images, but DeepDream deliberately over-interprets these images, picking out normally meaningless elements and exaggerating them. After being run through the program, a picture of a wandering cloud may turn into a bizarre fish, or a many-headed dog.

I was chatting with an old friend yesterday and he reminded me of a conversation we had nearly 50 years ago. I tried to explain to him what I did for living and he was trying to understand why getting computers to understand was more complicated than key word analysis. I explained about concepts underlying sentences and explained that sentences used words but that people really didn't use words in their minds except to get to the underlying ideas and that computers were having a hard time with that. Fifty years later, key words are still dominating the thoughts of people who try to get computers to deal with language. But, this time, the key word people have deceived the general public by making claims that this is thinking, that AI is here, and that, by the way we should be very afraid, or very excited, I forget which.

Google is launching a new artificial intelligence group called "Magenta" to see if computers can create their own masterpieces, according to Quartz. The group was reportedly outlined on Sunday by Douglas Eck, a researcher at Google Brain (one of Google's well-established AI divisions), at the Moogfest tech and music festival in Durham, North Carolina. Magenta, due to launch more publicly at the start of June, will reportedly aim to establish whether AIs can be trained to create original pieces of music, art, or video. In order to determine whether this is possible, the Magenta team will use TensorFlow -- a software library for machine intelligence that Google built and opened up to the public at the end of last year. The first product to be released by Magenta will be a simple program that's designed to help researchers import music data from MIDI music files into TensorFlow, according to Quartz.