PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that what's happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future. So I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, and once I did that, I wanted to make sure I wrote a post that really explained this whole situation and why it matters so much. Not shockingly, that became outrageously long, so I broke it into two parts. This is Part 1--Part 2 is here. We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. It seems like a pretty intense place to be standing--but then you have to remember something about what it's like to stand on a time graph: you can't see what's to your right. So here's how it actually feels to stand there: Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750--a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. It's impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someone's face and chat with them even though they're on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery.

A Kansas Tinder user was recently kidnapped, beaten and held against her will for six days by a man she met via the app. Shane Steven Allen faces one charge of kidnapping and four of aggravated battery. Should the convictions go through, Allen could serve a 32 year prison sentence. The woman, a 20 year-old student at the University of Kansas, was kidnapped on April 12th and was returned to her sorority on April 18th with multiple injuries including a pair of black eyes, broken blood vessels in her eyes and multiple bruises and abrasions, according to local news outlet Lawrence Journal World.

The law firm BakerHostetler officially hired the first artificial intelligence lawyer. IBM makes the robot lawyer, and apparently, it will work in the firm's bankruptcy practice -- because what better way to test out a robot lawyer than by putting people with their lives crumbling around them in its virtual hands. Look, once I watched the entirety of "I, Robot" without sound on another guy's screen on a flight, so, yeah, you could say I already know a lot about artificial intelligence. But not even I, with my extensive experience in the subject, could predict robotics would have already developed so far, a law firm would actually hire an artificially intelligent lawyer. IBM named this lawyer robot "ROSS" because, even though he is a robot, he is first and foremost a lawyer and, therefore, very boring.

In a standing room only theater, a dozen Austin startups, ranging from emerging companies to bigger ventures, received awards Wednesday night as part of the Austin A-List of the Hottest Startups. The Austin Chamber, through its Innovate Austin initiative, and South by Southwest Interactive put the event on every year at ACL Live at the Moody Theater. An estimated 750 people attended the event. A panel of independent judges reviewed about 200 companies to pick the winners in three investment stage categories: emerging, growth and scale. "The A-List reinforces our efforts to attract funding, talent, and companies which enhances our diverse tech and innovation community," Michele Skelding, senior vice president of Global Technology and Innovation, Austin Chamber, said in a news release.

Humans are continuously emitting chemicals into the air – whether by breath or through the skin. Now, researchers have discovered the chemicals found in exhaled breath actually correspond to human emotions, especially while watching certain genres of films. By measuring chemical signatures, they could determine a person's reaction to specific films on a scene-by-scene basis and the type of scene playing – with comedy and suspense eliciting a particularly pungent response. Researchers have discovered that the chemicals found in exhaled breath actually correspond to human emotion. By measuring the chemical components, they could determined a person's reaction to movies on a scene-by-scene basis and types of scene playing– particularly suspenseful or funny ones The team conducted a large scale study involving more than 9,500 moviegoers who watched 108 screenings of 16 different films in two separate theaters at the Cinestar Cinema in Mainz, Germany.

The first trailer for December's Assassin's Creed dropped last night on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Based on Ubisoft's long running videogame franchise, the film stars Michael Fassbender as a former death row inmate forced to step into the shoes of an ancestor of his who lived during the Spanish Inquisition. This all probably makes a lot of sense to you if you've played any one of the eleventeen Assassin's Creed videogames published by Ubisoft over the last decade. If not, you're likely left with a lot of questions as to what exactly is going on here. Fortunately, we have sunk hundreds of hours into various Assassin's Creed games and feel qualified to answer said queries.

Yorgos Lanthimos makes enigmatic films that exist in universes all their own. His latest, "The Lobster," is at once cerebral and emotional, an abstracted allegory on power, love and the power of love. His films can also be so cryptic and inscrutable that they remain mysterious even to their maker. Few filmmakers are as reticent to give definitive answers, open to outside interpretations or willing to simply respond to questions with an "I don't know." "Well, what am I going to do, fake it?"

A single node in a simple neural network takes some number of inputs, and then performs a weighted sum of those inputs, multiplying them each by some weight before adding them all together. Then, some constant (called "bias") is added, and the overall sum is then squashed into a range (usually -1 to 1 or 0 to 1) using a nonlinear activation function, such as a sigmoid function.

Michael Schmidt is the founder and CTO of Nutonian. But despite all the talk around AI, no one seems to really understand what it is or how companies can use it. Is AI the computer that competed on Jeopardy? Will machines really take our jobs? As data volumes surge and analytic engines become more mature, has technology finally caught up with the hype?

If you tell Siri to set an alarm for 5 am, she'll set an alarm for 5 am. But if you start asking her which prescription pain killer is least likely to upset your stomach, she's not really gonna know what to do--just because that's a pretty complicated sentence. Siri is a long way from what computer scientists call "natural language understanding." She can't truly understand the natural way we humans talk--despite the way Apple portrays her in all those TV ads. In fact, we shouldn't really be talking about her as a "her" at all.