A recent conversation with Fred Zimmerman, a long time friend and publishing entrepreneur, woke me up to the fact that the a part of the publishing industry that has long resisted technology may finally be ripe for transformation. The key question is: Does algorithmic content creation that uses machine learning and automation have a role to play in content creation? The first impulse of most people like me, who have spent much of their careers writing for love and money, is to loudly answer NO WAY. I firmly believe that it is impossible to replace the creativity of the human mind and the skill of writing learned over years with an algorithm. But Zimmerman, who is CEO of Nimble Books, is pioneering a new technique he calls combinatorial publishing that can create a book that is useful in seconds for pennies.

We all know how frustrating the experience of calling into a customer service department can be. Long hold times, the endless repetition of birth dates, previous addresses, maiden names... It's enough to make you want to avoid the whole process altogether. But the cloud--paired with technologies like speech recognition, biometrics, natural language, artificial intelligence and machine learning--is giving rise to intelligent virtual agents that are providing faster, more personalized service. Automated customer service solutions have been around for a while, but the cloud is drastically improving the model. Intelligent virtual agents can now crunch data about who you are and what you need, providing the kind of efficient feedback loop required to autonomously keep getting smarter.

Czech playwright Karel Capek coined the term'robot' in post-WWI 1920 in his play R.U.R. (for Rossum's Universal Robots) that was first performed in Prague in 1921. It was taken from the Czech word'robota' meaning work, to describe humanoid androids designed for menial and repetitive labor. In the play, docile mechanical creatures with human characteristics were produced in Rossum's factory, until one scientist gave them emotions and turned them into killing machines that took over the world.

After a huge flying saucer landed on the mall in Washington, DC in 1951, a benevolent, humanoid, interplanetary alien visitor named Klaatu (Michael Rennie) who was seeking peace emerged down a ramp, followed to everyone's amazement by silent, killer bodyguard Gort - who had the ability to zap (vaporize or melt) weapons or tanks with a lethal, disintegration laser beam heat-ray behind his sliding visor. The robot, an interstellar guardian - a member of a police force, had the power to destroy worlds such as Earth, whose inhabitants were intent on destruction, aggression, and hostility. However, his main objective was to warn Earth to establish peace - and to demonstrate his power, he shut down the world's power supply (hence, the film's title "The Day the Earth Stood Still").

Nao, from young French firm Aldebaran Robotics, is one of the better known small humanoid education and research robots--but he's about to be replaced: By Nao Next Gen. The new robot is an evolution of the existing design, but it may also be a revolution because the number of tweaks is significant. As well as boosting the in-robot cameras to a twin HD-video solution, the team has given the bot an upgraded Atom 1.6GHz CPU, a better walking algorithm, better control of its servo's torque so the robots movements are more fluid and powerful, and a few other tweaks. But most significantly they've added in voice recognition from Nuance--the same innovative firm whose technology is behind the amazing powers of Apple's Siri digital personal assistant in the iPhone 4S. Of course Nao will react differently to voice commands than Siri, and it's unlikely to call your wife or set up a calendar entry on voice command.

Google's next foray into the burgeoning world of artificial intelligence will be a creative one. The company has previewed a new effort to teach AI systems to generate music and art called Magenta. It'll launch officially on June 1st, but Google gave attendees at the annual Moogfest music and tech festival a preview of what's in store. As Quartz reports, Magenta comes from Google's Brain AI group -- which is responsible for many uses of AI in Google products like Translate, Photos and Inbox. It builds on previous efforts in the space, using TensorFlow -- Google's open-source library for machine learning -- to train computers to create art.

Clickbait headlines are the lowest form of journalism, but could they be written by a machine? After all, the Associated Press is using one to write complete financial articles, terrible as they are. Developer Lars Eidnes figured that "if this sort of writing truly is formulaic and unoriginal, we should be able to produce it automatically." Rather than building another Upworthy-style headline generator, however, Eidnes took it up a notch by enlisting a so-called recurrent neural network (RNN). That's the same type of machine learning used by SwiftKey, for one, on its beta SwiftKey Neural word-prediction app.

With Ex Machina, the directorial debut of 28 Days Later and Sunshine writer Alex Garland, we can finally put the Turing test to rest. You've likely heard of it -- developed by legendary computer scientist Alan Turing (recently featured in The Imitation Game), it's a test meant to prove artificial intelligence in machines. But, given just how easy it is to trick, as well as the existence of more rigorous alternatives for proving consciousness, passing a test developed in the '50s isn't much of a feat to AI researchers today. Ex Machina isn't the first film to expose the limits of the Turing test, but it's by far one of the most successful. And, like the films 2001 and Primer, it's a work of science fiction that might end up giving you a case of philosophical whiplash. Ex Machina is constructed like a morality play.

LIKE big hairdos and dubious pop stars, the term "artificial intelligence" (AI) was big in the 1980s, vanished in the 1990s--and now seems to be attempting a comeback. The term re-entered public consciousness most dramatically with the release last year of "A.I.", a movie about a robot boy. But the term is also being rehabilitated within the computer industry. Researchers, executives and marketing people are using the expression without irony or inverted commas. And it is not always hype. The term is being applied, with some justification, to products that depend on technology that was originally cooked up by AI researchers.

IS IT a new medium on a par with film and music, a valuable educational tool, a form of harmless fun or a digital menace that turns children into violent zombies? Video gaming is all these things, depending on whom you ask. Gaming has gone from a minority activity a few years ago to mass entertainment. Video games increasingly resemble films, with photorealistic images, complex plotlines and even famous actors. The next generation of games consoles--which will be launched over the next few months by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo--will intensify the debate over gaming and its impact on society, as the industry tries to reach out to new customers and its opponents become ever more vocal. Games consoles are the most powerful mass-produced computers in the world and the new machines will offer unprecedented levels of performance.