The business of answering that question attracts hundreds of billions of dollars every year. As long as there have been things to buy, there has been a market for human attention. Much later, the first one cent copies of The Sun hit the streets of New York, inspired by the realization of its editor that it was much more valuable to sell each reader's attention to advertisers than to make money off newspaper sales directly. Today, that concept has been taken to an extreme. Thousands of algorithms on millions of servers auction off your every click and tap, anticipating which emails you'll open, which search results you'll read, even how your eye might dart around the page. Google and Facebook rely almost exclusively on directly reselling human attention.

The ninth season of Drag Race notched eight Emmy nods, including for Reality Competition Host which he won last year. RuPaul's streak continued on Wednesday as Hulu announced that it has optioned Queen, a fictionalized half-hour dramedy chronicling his rise to fame, to be produced by JJ Abrams' Bad Robot. Power executive producer Gary Lennon is slated to write the series, which will be set in 1980s New York. While RuPaul is a San Diego native, he moved to Atlanta for theatrical training before moving to the East Coast to make a name for himself, as recounted in a recent episode of Up/Close with The Hollywood Reporter. This production also marks the second time Bad Robot and Hulu have worked together.

A musician improvises alongside A.I. Duet, software developed in part by Google's Magenta That's a question bordering on the philosophical, but artificial intelligence (AI) can certainly make music and artwork that people find pleasing. Last year, Google launched Magenta, a research project aimed at pushing the limits of what AI can do in the arts. Science spoke with Douglas Eck, the team's lead in San Francisco, California, about the past, present, and future of creative AI. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. Q: How does Magenta compose music?

One of the most common uses of machine learning is image recognition. There are many situations where you can classify the object as a digital image. For digital images, the measurements describe the outputs of each pixel in the image. In the case of a black and white image, the intensity of each pixel serves as one measurement. So if a black and white image has N*N pixels, the total number of pixels and hence measurement is N2.

One of Mark Zuckerberg's key New Year resolutions for 2016 was to build his own "simple AI bot" that could help him with the household tasks. Remember the image of the butler, Jarvis from Iron Man? That's a classic Hollywood example of how AI works. But, what precisely is Artificial Intelligence and how can it solve the most common UX problems today? Artificial Intelligence (or AI) is an advanced human-like computerized system that has the ability to intelligently manage the activities and systems which humans usually do manually. While bots like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Echo are programmed to take on our most mundane tasks, bots like Google's Deep Dream are inherently creative, helping users in problem-solving, thereby improving their experience.

The artificial intelligence of today has almost nothing in common with the AI of science fiction. In "Star Wars," "Star Trek" and "Battlestar Galactica," we're introduced to robots who behave like we do -- they are aware of their surroundings, understand the context of their surroundings and can move around and interact with people just as I can with you. These characters and scenarios are postulated by writers and filmmakers as entertainment, and while one day humanity will inevitably develop an AI like this, it won't happen in the lifetime of anyone reading this article. Because we can rapidly feed vast amounts of data to them, machines appear to be learning and mimicking us, but in fact they are still at the mercy of the algorithms we provide. To illustrate this in grossly simplified terms, imagine a computer system in an autonomous car.

On August 31, 2012, four Amazon engineers filed the fundamental patent for what ultimately became Alexa, an artificial--intelligence system designed to engage with one of the world's biggest and most tangled data sets: human speech. The engineers needed just 11 words and a simple diagram to describe how it would work. A male user in a quiet room says: "Please play'Let It Be,' by the Beatles." A small tabletop machine replies: "No problem, John," and begins playing the requested song. From that modest start, voice-based AI for the home has become a big business for Amazon and, increasingly, a strategic battleground with its technology rivals. Google, Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft are each putting thousands of researchers and business specialists to work trying to create irresistible versions of easy-to-use devices that we can talk with. "Until now, all of us have bent to accommodate tech, in terms of typing, tapping, or swiping.

Armies of content moderators are working to scrub social networks of the worst content humanity has to offer -- violence, gore, hardcore sexual imagery -- and they can't keep up. The disturbing litany of murders, suicides and assaults have already become macabre technological milestones. These include Robert Godwin Sr., the 74-year-old father of nine and grandfather of 14 who was selected by a gunman at random and then murdered in a video posted to Facebook in mid-April. One week later, a man in Thailand streamed the murder of his 11-month old daughter on Facebook Live before taking his own life. The beating and torture of an 18-year-old man with intellectual and development disabilities was live-streamed on the service in January, and the tragic shooting death of two-year-old Lavontay White Jr. followed a month later on Valentine's Day.

Drivers are avoiding parking spots that require payment by phone as cash remains a more popular way to pay, according to the AA. The motoring organisation's survey of 16,000 members suggests seven out of 10 would look for parking elsewhere rather than use the "pay by phone" meters. The AA says people are put off by administration fees and voice-controlled phone payment systems. But councils said that paying by phone was a quick and convenient option. Nearly eight in 10 pensioners who responded to the AA survey said they would drive on rather than use them, the same proportion as drivers on low incomes.

Google Home doesn't have a huge range of on-demand music services on offer (Google's services and Spotify are your biggest choices), but you can add one to the list today. Deezer has launched Home support for its streaming music service, giving listeners in several countries a hands-free music source if they're not fans of the larger providers. The stand-out is voice control over Deezer's semi-automatic Flow playlist -- you can tell Home to "play your Flow" and get a highly personalized playlist with very little effort. Not surprisingly, Deezer is catering to its core European audience first: it's starting today with support in France and Germany, while the US, UK, Australia and Canada are due later in 2017. You probably won't rush to sign up for Deezer if you weren't already a member, but look at it this way: few music services outside of the majors work with voice-guided speakers, so this could be a reason to stick to Deezer if you were thinking of jumping ship.