One of the tropes of science fiction is the uncanny valley -- the phenomenon of a robot looking eerily human-like but not quite right in some intangible way. Another is the breakdown in the distinction between human and machine. And a third is artificial intelligence becoming so complex and sophisticated that humans are no longer able to understand or control it. Well, not to be the bearer of bad news, but all of those tropes from the movies are already happening. The good news is that some of these advances have the potential to make our lives a lot better.

Yesterday, Microsoft launched its latest artificial intelligence (AI) bot named Tay. It is aimed at 18 to-24-year-olds and is designed to improve the firm's understanding of conversational language among young people online. But within hours of it going live, Twitter users took advantage of flaws in Tay's algorithm that meant the AI chatbot responded to certain questions with racist answers. These included the bot using racial slurs, defending white supremacist propaganda, and supporting genocide. Yesterday, Microsoft launched its latest artificial intelligence (AI) bot aimed at 18 to 24-year-olds to improve their understanding of conversational language among young people online.

Artificial Intelligence became a hot topic earlier this year 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.

Tom Popomaronis is the founder and CEO of OpiaTalk. Have you tried the Quartz News app, yet? Imagine a text conversation with a bot that sends you a news topic. You're then presented with two choices: Either tap a string of relevant (and surprisingly entertaining) emojis, which is like pressing "learn more," or tap an "anything else?" button to have another topic served: If you opt for the emojis, the app sends 1-3 follow-on texts that provide a high-level summary of the story and link to the article. If you're lucky, you'll even see a pertinent and entertaining gif in the mix for added value. When it comes to news apps in general, I like to scroll through a daily aggregator feed I've personalized to my liking; I usually don't want someone else telling me which news stories to pay attention to -- especially not one at a time.

Over a year ago, following an original presentation at MLConf, I wrote a blog post entitled "10 Lessons Learned from building ML systems". At that point, I was leading the Algorithms Engineering team at Netflix and those lessons reflected lessons we had learned there over the last few years. When you do a post/presentation like that, you don't really know how it is going to be received. Some things might be obvious to many while others might be controversial and some will not agree. It turns out though that it was very well received and referenced elsewhere (e.g.

You may know Watson for its ability to dominate Jeopardy, but did you know it has impressive movie skills too? IBM has hinted at Watson's movie-watching capabilities, like in its commercial with film director Ridley Scott, but we've never seen it in practice. So we asked Watson to tell us what it thought of the "Harry Potter" original book series and movies -- and the results are really interesting. By analyzing written text, Watson can identify different tones such as fear, joy, confidence, and openness. It can also analyze written text to assess personality traits based on the Big Five test, one of the most common, preferred ways psychologists use to measure personality.

One of the tropes of science fiction is the uncanny valley -- the phenomenon of a robot looking eerily human-like but not quite right in some intangible way. Another is the breakdown in the distinction between human and machine. And a third is artificial intelligence becoming so complex and sophisticated that humans are no longer able to understand or control it. Well, not to be the bearer of bad news, but all of those tropes from the movies are already happening. The good news is that some of these advances have the potential to make our lives a lot better.

Drone maker DJI's latest release, the Phantom 4, makes it easier than ever to capture beautiful aerial photos and videos. But the Chinese firm is working on ways to make the process simpler still. The company is currently building a set of automatic camera maneuvers that could allow Phantom 4 owners to nail complex shots by just pushing a button. "A lot of people, what they'll do is they'll fly around and their first shots aren't that great because they're getting used to it," says Pan. The feature would allow Phantom 4 owners to choose from a selection of camera maneuvers that the drone would be able to execute on its own.

In 2012, a year which feels a lot like the very early years of the era of data, Wired published this article on Narrative Science, an organization based in Chicago that uses Machine Learning algorithms to write news articles. Its founder and CEO, Kris Hammond, is a man whose enthusiasm for algorithmic possibilities is unparalleled. When asked whether an algorithm would win a Pulitzer in the next 20 years he goes further, claiming that it could happen in the next 5 years. Hammond's excitement at what his organization is doing is not unwarranted. But his optimism certainly is. Unless 2017 is a particularly poor year for journalism and literary nonfiction, a Pulitzer for one of Narrative Science's algorithms looks unlikely to say the least.

Ali Kheyrollahi is a solution architect building web scale solutions, trying to marry scalability with performance. He loves HTTP, API design and business-modelling DDD-style. An Open Source author and blogger, he tries to give back to the community what he has gratefully taken from it. He is a blogger and has co-authored a book. "BUILD STUFF" is a Software Development Conference for people who actually build stuff.