In 2012, there was an air of innocence when I took over as the Readers' Editor of this newspaper. Terms such as'accuracy', 'fairness', 'authentic sources', and'verification', and C.P. Scott's dictum "Comment is free, but facts are sacred" did possess a striking potential to keep journalism on the straight and narrow path. Algorithm was a part of mathematics and technology and it had hardly revealed its stranglehold on the information ecology. Artificial intelligence was a footnote. Albert Einstein's wry remark, "Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity," was invoked sometimes to prove a point.

A Kiwi company developing artificial intelligence has delivered its latest digital human, called Rachel. Rachel can see, hear and respond to you. She is an avatar created by two-time Oscar winner Mark Sagar, who worked on the blockbuster movie of the same name. Mr Sagar, of Auckland-based company Soul Machines, says his aim is to make man socialise with machine, by putting a human face on artificial intelligence. "So what we are doing with Soul Machines is trying to build the central nervous system for humanising this kind of computer," he says.

Please invite your friends and colleagues to join the conversation and let me know what you think, and what we're missing. Just reply to this email, or email steve@axios.com. Let's dive right in with a question: 1 big idea: Could robots make us even more polarized? Sam Jayne / Axios Over the last decade or so, we've seen ordinarily apolitical topics polarize us into angry opposing mobs, among them vaccines, atmospheric gases and Russia. When there has been a super-strong view one way or another, it's been sucked into the hothouse and associated with an ideology.

It is no doubt that the sub-field of machine learning / artificial intelligence has increasingly gained more popularity in the past couple of years. As Big Data is the hottest trend in the tech industry at the moment, machine learning is incredibly powerful to make predictions or calculated suggestions based on large amounts of data. Some of the most common examples of machine learning are Netflix's algorithms to make movie suggestions based on movies you have watched in the past or Amazon's algorithms that recommend books based on books you have bought before. So if you want to learn more about machine learning, how do you start? For me, my first introduction is when I took an Artificial Intelligence class when I was studying abroad in Copenhagen.

It would be a lot appreciated and helpful if you take 5mn of your time fulfilling this survey. Even though I'm a business student, I have some strong interests in Sciences and moreover Innovation. Lately, I have been like some of you really impressed by some technological achievements in transportation made by Google, Tesla or Uber... just to name a few. Having also some interests in the automobile sector I couldn't not try to imagine what the future will look like with the change to come, so I tried to put my vision through this work. With your help, this survey will help me to have a better understanding of the question.

Worse still, AI is not yet fully democratized and has remained largely the bastion of major tech companies. As it stands now, the vast majority of AI is being developed within the enormous black hole of a few major technology companies. The problems they are tackling, even if real and worthwhile, address just a tiny portion of AI's potential to impact the tech industry and the overall economy, not to mention humanity as a whole. These companies' control of the vast majority of talent, data, and other resources necessary to develop life-changing technologies is bad for any number of stakeholders who would otherwise stand to benefit from AI.

Q: I looked up my name at a people search site. Wow! Anyone can see my age, where I live, names of my relatives and more, for free! Can I remove these very personal details? A: I'm glad you searched for yourself, and I wish more people would. Many people are shocked to learn how much is freely exposed online: name, age, current address, past addresses, voting records, criminal history and so on. It's almost impossible to delete yourself from the internet completely, but you can easily crack down on these people search databases, no lawyer required.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a real and growing part of our lives. From voice-controlled assistants to online ordering to self driving cars in development, AI is the brains behind computer software. As it improves computers, making them faster and smarter, is this technology a threat? "I wouldn't see it as a threat, necessarily," Recode reporter April Glaser told CNBC's "On the Money" in an interview. "But artificial intelligence programs do know more than you or I do, particularly when it comes to specific areas."

Around midnight one Saturday in January, Sarah Jeong was on her couch, browsing Twitter, when she spontane ously wrote what she now bitterly refers to as "the tweet that launched a thousand ships." The 28-year-old journalist and author of The Internet of Garbage, a book on spam and online harassment, had been watching Bernie Sanders boosters attacking feminists and supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement. In what was meant to be a hyper bolic joke, she tweeted out a list of political carica tures, one of which called the typical Sanders fan a "vitriolic crypto racist who spends 20 hours a day on the Internet yelling at women." The ill-advised late-night tweet was, Jeong admits, provocative and absurd--she even supported Sanders. But what happened next was the kind of backlash that's all too familiar to women, minorities, and anyone who has a strong opinion online. By the time Jeong went to sleep, a swarm of Sanders supporters were calling her a neoliberal shill. By sunrise, a broader, darker wave of abuse had begun. She received nude photos and links to disturbing videos. One troll promised to "rip each one of [her] hairs out" and "twist her tits clear off." The attacks continued for weeks. "I was in crisis mode," she recalls. So she did what many victims of mass harassment do: She gave up and let her abusers have the last word.