We live in a post-mainstream culture. As the way we consume books, movies and television changes, artists and directors no longer need to cater to a "universal" audience viewpoint. This means there is slightly less obligation to pander to what straight white men are supposed to want from culture. Not everyone is happy about that fact, and across the literary and cultural spectrum, tantrums are being thrown. This week the target is the new, all-female Ghostbusters.

Google's finally interweaving the deep treasure troves of information it holds about the world at large and you, specifically. Google Assistant is a conversational digital assistant built around the company's strengths in deep learning and natural language recognition, summoned at an utterance of "Ok Google" to respond to any queries you may have. It can understand context depending on the topic at hand, too: Holding your camera at a famous sculpture and asking "Who designed this?" will get an answer, as will queries like "Show me his other movies" after asking something like "Who directed The Revenant?" Google Assistant will be able to play music playlists, file reminders, help you buy movie tickets, and a whole lot more. Interestingly, it doesn't appear to be a discrete app; instead, it appears tied to be baked right into Google-y gadgets, in what Google CEO Sundar Pichai calls "an ambient experience that extends across devices." Think of it as a supercharged version of Google Now, mixed with Amazon's Alexa.

A trade worth an estimated 20 billion, the beauty industry continually grows at a rate of around 3 percent annually. Unfortunately, the industry merely survives in the digital age where some industries are booming. Hence, artificial intelligence is deemed as a key to unlock the exponential growth of this industry. A rtificial intelligence could one day scan the music videos we watch to come up with predictive music discovery options based on the emotions of the performer. Which means that A.I. will soon be able to recognize Bono's sad face and serve you more mopey Bono, or perhaps something more smiley.

Building a simple but powerful recommendation system is much easier than you think. This guide explains innovations that make machine learning practical for business production settingsand demonstrates how even a small-scale development team can design an effective large-scale recommender. In this guide, Practical Machine Learning: Innovations in Recommendation, authors and Mahout committers Ted Dunning and Ellen Friedman shed light on a more approachable recommendation engine design and the business advantages for leveraging this innovative implementation style.

Meet BB-8 - the app-enabled Droid that's as authentic as it is advanced. BB-8 has something unlike any other robot - an adaptive personality that changes as you play. Based on your interactions, BB-8 will show a range of expressions and even perk up when you give voice commands. Set it to patrol and watch your Droid explore autonomously, make up your own adventure and guide BB-8 yourself, or create and view holographic recordings. It currently averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon (read reviews).

In a previous post I wrote about how to build a'People Who Like This Also Like ...' feature for displaying lists of similar musicians. My goal was to show how simple Information Retrieval techniques can do a good job calculating lists of related artists. For instance, using BM25 distance on The Beatles shows the most similar artists being John Lennon and Paul McCartney. One interesting technique I didn't cover was using Matrix Factorization methods to reduce the dimensionality of the data before calculating the related artists. This kind of analysis can generate matches that are impossible to find with the techniques in my original post.

Could we soon be getting it on in the front seats of our cars? With the rise of self-driving vehicles, all of the time that was once spent navigating the road could soon be spent having sex. At least that's what Barrie Kirk of the Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre of Excellence recently told The Toronto Sun. "I am predicting that, once computers are doing the driving, there will be a lot more sex in cars," Kirk said, adding that could mean big trouble because it will be "one of several things people will do which will inhibit their ability to respond quickly when the computer says to the human, 'Take over.'" On this week's HuffPost Love Sex Podcast, I chat with my co-host, Carina Kolodny, about the future of vehicular sex and what could be in store for us.

Artificial intelligence can control self-driving cars, beat the best humans at incredibly complex board games, and fight cancer; but one thing it can't do perfectly is communicate. To help solve the problem, Google has been feeding it's AI with more than 11,000 unpublished books, including 3,000 steamy romance titles. "come with me," she said. "talk to me," she said. "don't worry about it," she said.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, now an Executive Editor at The Verge and Editor at Large of Recode. Google announced something for everyone yesterday at its 10th annual I/O developer conference. There were more details of a new version of Android; new messaging and video-calling apps; a built-in new VR platform for Android; and a good-looking Amazon Echo-like smart speaker called Google Home. There was even a cool new research project called Instant Apps that will let users run portions of apps from the web without installing them first. But the biggest theme stressed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai and his lieutenants, over and over again throughout the two-hour keynote, was that Google is doubling down on artificial intelligence as the next great phase of computing.

The predictive powers of computers will work nicely in cases where reality does not change dramatically. However, it will fail in any case where there are dramatic, unpredictable, changes in the future. The authoritative science journal Nature announced recently that a computer designed by Google's DeepMind defeated a human master in the ancient Chinese board game, "Go." This impressive achievement once again raised the expectations for a predicted future in which computers will have artificial intelligence, with major media outlets worldwide touting this anticipated future. One of the major questions raised in response to DeepMind's achievement is what are the outer limits, if any, of intelligent machines?