Self-driving cars and robots that can zoom on their own around warehouses are just some of what's possible because of artificial intelligence. But expect unforeseen consequences if researchers ignore the inherent ethical dilemmas in the emerging technology. That's one of the takeaways from a panel about AI ethics and education in San Francisco that was hosted by the Future of Life Institute, a research group focused on preventing societal problems created by the technology. Although humans typically program AI-powered robots to accomplish a particular goal, these robots will typically make decisions on their own to reach the goal, explained Benjamin Kuipers, a computer science professor and AI researcher at the University of Michigan. It's these smaller decisions that robots make on their own that can cause trouble because human programmers may fail to take all of a robot's possible choices into account, Kuipers said.

Super Bowl commercials get worse and worse every year. This year, Super Bowl LI's ads were preachier and less funny than ever. However, a few good commercials did make it in front of the 100 million plus eyeballs that tuned into the big game yesterday. Leading the pack were video game commercials and movie and TV trailers. Let's take a look at the best commercials that aired during this year's Super Bowl.

Something odd happened around the country while the Super Bowl commercial for the Google Home speaker ran on TVs everywhere. The ad, which showed loving families using the smart home speaker for listening to music and turning on and off the lights, also managed to set off Google Homes in the real world, surprising their owners. Google Home owners quickly ran to Twitter to explain that since the advertisement features someone saying "Okay, Google," their Home units were activated at the same time. These users had no recourse but to let this happen, as Google's speaker offers no option to set a different wake phrase. Some owners of Amazon's Echo, Dot and Tap speakers may be familiar with this moment, as a TV news report in San Diego once triggered the Alexa-based speakers to order dollhouses.

Noah Hawley's "Legion," on FX, the latest Marvel production based on the X-Men, has an aesthetic that might be described as caustic whimsy. It's a sleek, stylized diorama of alarming imagery, as much about fear orange and misery avocado and rage yellow as it is about anything else. You don't actually have to understand much about the X-Men to enjoy watching it. This is good news, since the X-Men, a byzantine superhero mythology that launched, in 1963, as a comic-book series, has always intimidated me. I've got a layman's knowledge of the movies, and I enjoyed Marvel franchises like "Jessica Jones" and "Luke Cage," spinoffs from adjacent mythologies. On occasion, I've tried to absorb the Wikipedia page about the comic books, a document that makes the Talmud look like SparkNotes.

Lady Gaga's Super Bowl LI halftime show on Sunday had something many viewers had never seen before: Hundreds of light-emitting drones flying in a synchronized pattern to show the American flag and, later, the Pepsi logo. How'd they pull that off? It's thanks to an Intel technology called Shooting Star, which lets programmers design airborne light shows with swarms of drones. Here's more on how Shooting Star works, via Wired: Each drone is about a foot long square, weighs just over eight ounces, and sports a plastic and foam body to soften inadvertent impacts. They aren't as flashy as consumer quadcopters, which is just as well, because you're not supposed to notice them.

Creating a TV ad for a smart speaker is a toughie. The easiest way to show what it can do is to have people invoke it with voice commands, but then you risk activating the speakers of TV viewers who actually own them. This appears to have happened to Google, whose Super Bowl ad for Google Home caused a great deal of confusion in many users' homes. "OK Google, turn on the hall lights." "OK Google, turn off the music."

Leila Kosseim, associate professor in Concordia's Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, and a recently-graduated doctoral student, Shamima Mithun, have developed a system called BlogSum that has potentially vast applications. It allows an organization to pose a question and then find out how a large number of people talking online would respond. The system is capable of gauging things like consumer preferences and voter intentions by sorting through websites, examining real-life self-expression and conversation, and producing summaries that focus exclusively on the original question. "Huge quantities of electronic texts have become easily available on the Internet, but people can be overwhelmed, and they need help to find the real content hiding in the mass of information," explains Kosseim, one of the lead researchers at Concordia's Computational Linguistics Laboratory (CLaC lab). Analyzing informally-written language poses unique challenges compared to analyzing, for example, a news article.

Remember when quadcopter drones juggled balls and formed up into a Star Trek logo? That seems downright quaint compared to what we just saw at Lady Gaga's elaborately produced Super Bowl halftime show. During her first number, 300 Intel drones formed the shape of an American flag, punctuating the singer's wire-assisted fall to the stage below. Ok... Gaga using Drones for the synchronized sky lighting was impressive #SuperBowl #PepsiHalftime pic.twitter.com/SIxuMp3OT1 The "Shooting Star" drones Intel introduced last year are a foot across and weigh just eight ounces, thanks to a foam body designed to soften impacts.

The article was published in Marketer 3(22) 2016 and it is available here: www.sklep.marketerplus.pl If you still believe that your daily activities are the result of your own choices, you are mistaken. Few of us understand that our purchasing decisions, and increasingly our life decisions, are heavily influenced by advanced algorithms. Algorithms divide potential customers into groups on the basis of their behavior, interests or decisions that they make. They don't just analyze data, they predict the path customers will take in the future and, for example, cleverly controlling product margins.

A new report from market research firm Tractica forecasts that the annual global revenue for artificial intelligence products and services will grow from 643.7 million in 2016 to $36.8 billion by 2025, a 57-fold increase over that time period. As such, it represents the fastest growing segment of any size in the IT sector. According to the report, "AI has applications and use cases in almost every industry vertical and is considered the next big technological shift, similar to past shifts like the industrial revolution, the computer age, and the smartphone revolution." Even ignoring that bit of hyperbole, a good case can be made that artificial intelligence certainly has the potential to upend a lot of industries, government activities and consumer behavior. In its report, Tactica identifies 27 verticals that are employing AI technologies today or soon will be.