When Tesla CEO, Elon Musk was asked about artificial intelligence, he said it was like'summoning a demon' who shouldn't be called unless you can control it. Yes, this is the founder of the same company whose cars are pushing new limits of technology every day. When Stephen Hawking was asked this same question by BBC, he cautioned the public by saying that any further advancement to artificial intelligence could be a fatal mistake. In another interview, he mentioned that AI has the power to re-design itself and take off on its own whereas humans have slow biological evolution, and they wouldn't be able to compete. Bill Gates, too, expressed his concern about this topic during a Reddit Ask me Anything session.

The machine overlords of the future may now, if it pleases them, eliminate all black and white imagery from the history of their meat-based former masters. All they'll need is this system from Berkeley computer scientist Richard Zhang, which allows a soulless silicon sentience to "hallucinate" colors into any monochrome image. It uses what's called a convolutional neural network (several, actually) -- a type of computer vision system that mimics low-level visual systems in our own brains in order to perceive patterns and categorize objects. Google's DeepDream is probably the most well-known example of one. Trained by examining millions of images of-- well, just about everything, Zhang's system of CNNs recognizes things in black and white photos and colors them the way it thinks they ought to be.

Imagine a future where life's most boring or dangerous tasks are handled by machines. Time otherwise spent commuting, scheduling appointments, sifting through mail, could be devoted to human passions instead. That's the best-case scenario for noted computer scientist Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, also known as "AI2," founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. "An AI utopia is a place where people have income guaranteed because their machines are working for them," he explains on a new episode of GeekWire's radio show. "Instead, they focus on activities that they want to do, that are personally meaningful like art or where human creativity still shines, in science. They're engaged in those activities because of the interaction. Another one would be, of course, interaction between people and not because they need to make a buck."

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be traced back to John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956 to define the concept of computers working as a human mind. Today, the scientists and tech-pundits define AI to be more creative than a human mind, something that can surpass and learn from the data gathered. Data Science can be defined as the part of AI, which analyses the data gathered with ever changing algorithms and has the capability to transform a program into self learning. Here are a few startups transforming the way people perceive AI and most of all, helping people and businesses transform by automating work. Jukedeck is based on state-of-the-art tech, brings artificial intelligence to music composition.

Artificial Intelligence became a hot topic early in 2015 when suddenly all the heads of big tech firms were voicing their opinions around it. A movie called Ex-Machina helped contribute to the debate around AI as it demonstrated how a robot could gain so much human intelligence that it was able to manipulate humans and escape from their control. Understandably it prompted both excitement and concern. Similarly the Matrix films portrayed humans as believing they exist while actually living in an artificial or simulated world. It is thanks to popular science fiction films that our understanding of AI has grown.

Most babies' first words are "mama" and "dada," but for an artificially intelligent being called "BABY X," her first words were "puppy," "apple," and "sheep." Aww! How adorable for technology that so many believe will power our future mechanical overlords. And at least it's better than Tay.ai, Microsoft's teenaged AI Twitter robot that recently got sent to her room for spewing hate all over the Internet. BABY X was created by Dr. Mark Sagar, a motion graphics specialist who won Oscars for his work on movies like King Kong and Avatar.

It was a thing in the '90s. You put on this giant space helmet and it allowed you to enter a world of brightly-coloured polygons -- it was a bit like being Max Headroom. It rightly fizzled, but now it's back with a vengeance. There were no fewer than 40 different Virtual Reality seminars over the course of this year's SXSW Interactive festival, which saw tech leaders revisiting some ideas of yesteryear, having another crack, and succeeding handsomely. It seems that everything old is new again.

In the field of robotics, innovations and developments are taking place constantly. Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most popular areas and has caught the fancy of not only scientists, but the common man as well. According to computer scientist, John McCarthy, "AI is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs." A robot which has artificial intelligence can behave like a human being and learn from its surroundings, like the robot Baymax, in the movie, Big Hero 6. Here are some popular real-life robots that use AI.

Lately I've been exploring reinforcement learning. I built a q-learning agent for Othello. It is table-based, so it obviously doesn't work well because the state-space of Othello is just too big for a table. So for the past week I've been investigating neural networks as q-learning approximators. I even put one together using Keras/Theanos, and something's going right because it wins 90% of games against an opponent that plays purely randomly (but gets crushed against monte-carlo, another agent I wrote, even if the simulation time for MC is very very short).

The rainwater collection system, solar panel farm and security robot are already up and running at The Edge building in Amsterdam. The interactive desk is a research project by Arup called "It's All About The Desk." The digital algae canopy is developed by the London-based ecoLogicStudio, who provided the footage. The system of surgically-implanted chips is operate by Epicenter, a hi-tech office block in Stockholm.