Folk music is part of a rich cultural context that stretches back into the past, encompassing the real and the mythical, bound to the traditions of the culture in which it arises. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, has no culture, no traditions. But it has shown great ability: beating grand masters at chess and Go, for example, or demonstrating uncanny wordplay skills when IBM Watson beat human competitors at Jeopardy. Could the power of AI be put to use to create music? This is not entirely unprecedented: an artificial intelligence co-wrote a piece of musical theatre, from the storyline to the music and lyrics.

"Does the world really need another wedding photographer?" That was the thought that ran through Saskia Nelson's mind when, having spontaneously resigned from her office job at a London Olympics legacy project, she was thinking of her next move. An amateur photographer, she decided four years ago, aged 43, that she was going to go professional. But she hadn't really worked out how, and so she used her three-month notice period to consider her options, one of which was to join the army of wedding snappers. "But I thought, 'I'm not married, it's not my bag, I don't really know anything about it,'" says Saskia.

Virtual reality and artificial intelligence, once limited to video game and programming curiosities, have shed their humble beginnings and are now poised to take over everything from the way we drive to the way we work. The more than 1,325 VR startups on Angel.co have an average valuation of $5 million. That's more than $6.6 billion in startup VR funds alone, not to mention all the established companies working feverishly to develop their own VR solutions. With the VR market poised to reach $70 billion by 2020 -- up from $6.7 billion in 2016 -- everyone now wants a slice of a pie that's suddenly much bigger than expected. From IBM's Watson to the Alexa and Google assistants now found in homes around the world, the ascension of AI in popular culture has been no secret.

What the film world is saying about'Ghost in the Shell,' 'Donnie Darko,' 'The Blackcoat's Daughter' and Walter Hill The new movie "Ghost in the Shell" had me thinking a lot this week about critics, movie journalism and how the conversation around a movie can come to define that movie. In some ways a movie only comes to really matter because of conversation around it, and "Ghost" generated some inspired, thought-provoking writing, including Justin Chang for The Times, Emily Yoshida for Vulture and Alison Willmore for Buzzfeed. The TCM Classic Film Festival kicks off on Thursday and runs through Sunday, April 9. It is always a treat because of the expertly chosen lineup, this year running from "America America" to "Zardoz," but also for the madcap enthusiasm of the audience members. This year will be especially poignant given the recent death of network host Robert Osborne, to whom this year's festival is now dedicated.

From awesome educational games your kids will love to vacation planning, your Apple TV is good for so much more than just watching TV. Despite the name, Apple's media streamer is good for much more than just binge-watching Westworld. And when you truly push it to its limits, a name like "Apple TV" doesn't do this powerful and multifaceted machine justice. Here are a few of the best insider tips and tricks to navigate your Apple Pizza Ordering-Music Streaming-Remote Controlled Everything-TV. Thanks to Apple TV's integration with Siri, you no longer have to endlessly scrub back and forth through movies and shows to find a specific moment.

In a squeaker, Fox and DreamWorks Animation's CG-animated family comedy "The Boss Baby" claimed the top spot at the box office, pulling in a bigger-than-expected weekend estimate of $49 million in the U.S. and Canada. Continuing to hold strong in its third weekend in release, "Beauty and the Beast" followed closely behind with $47.5 million, bringing the musical fairy tale's domestic total to within spitting distance of $400 million and its global haul to more than $875 million. Heading into the weekend, box office prognosticators were projecting an opening for "The Boss Baby" in the neighborhood of $33 million. But, with many kids across the country now on spring break and "Beauty and the Beast" no longer sucking up all the oxygen, "The Boss Baby" managed to handily outperform those expectations. Reviews for "The Boss Baby" -- which cast Alec Baldwin as the voice of a ruthless capitalist infant who declares with Trump-ian bluster that "cookies are for closers" -- were mixed at best, but audiences proved more favorable, giving the CG-animated film a CinemaScore of A-minus.

When you play the prediction game, you gotta go bold and with no real expectations of being right. We love the predictions Parks and Rec made even if they were wrong. They gave the last season of that great comedy even more life than it already had. Now excuse us while we go outside to thoroughly enjoy some of our national parks.

"Scientists fear revolt of killer robots." When he read that headline in a Sunday newspaper Alan Winfield, Professor of Robot Ethics at the Bristol Laboratory, was surprised to say the least. Speaking at a British Academy debate in Bristol on 1st March entitled "Does AI pose a threat to society?", Winfield said he had told the journalist who wrote the story that a discussion about robot ethics had been "rather dull--a case of scientists behaving responsibly." Winfield spent the next two days explaining that scientists are not especially exercised by killer robots. The issue was not merely media sensationalism. "Of course, robotics and intelligent systems must be engineered to high standards of safety, for exactly the same reasons that we need our washing machines, our cars, and our aeroplanes to be safe.

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but with a paper clip. In this scenario, the designers of the world's first artificial superintelligence need a way to test their creation. So they program it to do something simple and non-threatening: make paper clips. They set it in motion and wait for the results -- not knowing they've already doomed us all. Before we get into the details of this galaxy-destroying blunder, it's worth looking at what superintelligent A.I. actually is, and when we might expect it.

Visual aesthetics are very personal, often subconscious, and hard to express. In a world with an overload of photographic content, a lot of time and effort is spent manually curating photographs, and it's often hard to separate the good images from the visual noise. The question we put forward at EyeEm is: can a machine learn personalized aesthetics embodied in a set of chosen photos, and recreate them in a different set? The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance. Does this photograph draw your attention?