However, Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) earnings rocketed, sending the shares up a ballistic 15% in minutes. Are these numbers revealing a major new trend in our society? Are we soon to have our every need catered to without lifting a finger? After spending weeks preparing a major research piece for a private client on artificial intelligence, I would have to say that the answer is an overwhelming "Yes!" Artificial intelligence, or AI, is far more pervasive than you think. Half of all apps now rely on some form of AI, and within five years, all of them will.

China's Xiaomi impressed with its Mi Mix concept phone on Tuesday. But one aspect that some may have missed was the company's use of science fiction to promote its next-gen device. Specifically, one video showing off the Mi Mix is basically a mini-sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The one-minute spot puts Xiaomi's smartphone in the role of Kubrick's monolith, an all knowing, all seeing black rectangle that appears at various locations on Earth and other planets. As in the film, the Xiaomi video features a number of people (in this case, children) tentatively approaching the alien structures as if looking for an answer to the universe's ultimate question. It's not uncommon for tech companies to borrow from classic sci-fi, but this video is such an obvious copy of 2001's theme that we had to call it out.

Star Trek Beyond

The threats to the streaming TV company might not be Amazon or other streaming services, but instead "pharmacological" ways of entertaining people, Reed Hastings has said. And just as films and TV shows are a supposedly improved version of other entertainments, those same things might eventually become defunct, he said. In the same way that the cinema and TV screen made "the opera and the novel" much smaller, something else might be on the way to do the same thing, the Netflix boss said at a Wall Street Journal event. Amy Rimmer, Research Engineer at Jaguar Land Rover, demonstrates the car manufacturer's Advanced Highway Assist in a Range Rover, which drives the vehicle, overtakes and can detect vehicles in the blind spot, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire Chris Burbridge, Autonomous Driving Software Engineer for Tata Motors European Technical Centre, demonstrates the car manufacturer's GLOSA V2X functionality, which is connected to the traffic lights and shares information with the driver, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight. Aurora Flight Sciences' technicians work on an Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automantion System (ALIAS) device in the firm's Centaur aircraft at Manassas Airport in Manassas, Va.

The latest AI project from the MIT Media Lab is demonstrating just how terrifying the prospects of deep learning can go. IBM Watson creates the first AI-made film trailer – and it's incredibly creepy Welcome to the Nightmare Machine: an algorithm that has been trained to generate horrifying images. It is attempting to find the scariest faces and locations possible, and gets humans to tell it which are the worst. The first aspect of the project, Haunted Faces, is truly terrifying. The team behind the project, led by Iyad Rahwan, associate professor at MIT Media Lab, used deep learning to generate new faces, before dropping "a hint of scariness" onto the generated faces in the spirit of Halloween.

All four original members of Abba are to reunite for a new digital entertainment project. The Swedish pop group have not formally performed together since they split up more than 30 years ago but did appear at a 50th anniversary party in June. The project, which will involve virtual reality and artificial intelligence, has been described as a "new entertainment experience". It will be developed in collaboration with music manager Simon Fuller. "We are exploring a new technological world that will allow us to create new forms of entertainment and content we couldn't have previously imagined," Fuller said in a statement.

Apple has posted its first decline in annual revenue and profit since 2001, as the company looks for a way to offset falling sales of its flaghship iPhone. The tech giant has never posted a decline in annual revenues since the release of the iPod - until this week, when Apple revealed an 8 per cent drop in sales to $215 billion (£176 million) for 2016. The decline in sales dragged the company's profits down by 14 per cent to $45.7billion. The drop in sales was mostly down to declining sales of the iPhone, which accounts for two-thirds of Apple sales. Apple sold 45.5 million iPhones in the quarter, which while better than expected, compares to 48 million sold this time last year.

General Motors said Wednesday it had reached a partnership to integrate tech giant IBM's artificial intelligence platform into its vehicle infotainment system, giving it the ability to make dining recommendations and order prescriptions. The Detroit-based automaker will pair IBM's Watson with its popular safety and connectivity system in more than 2 million 4G LTE-connected vehicles to create OnStar Go. The company said examples of how the pairing could bear fruit include getting dining recommendations, reminders about the need to buy household items and help retrieving prescriptions from the pharmacy. Among the first applications: Drivers will be able to use the "cognitive mobility platform" to locate ExxonMobil gas stations and pay on screen in the vehicle, GM said. They will also be able to use the OnStar Go system to get customized music playlists from mobile app iHeartRadio.

"We created a virtual interactive avatar of the TV character, so that we can interact with the avatar in the same way that we would interact with the TV character themselves," Dr. James Charles, Research Fellow at the University of Leeds told Sputnik. "We're using TV shows as a scientific experiment. Our main goal is to capture what it is that makes people who they are and learn how to replicate this," Dr. Charles added. To make Joey talk, the team at Leeds University used an algorithm to pick from a database of sound units, scientifically known as phonemes. They selected the correct phoneme in order to string a sentence together and make it sound smooth and natural with the correct intonation and using the right words.

Interfacing a kinetic action of a person to an action of a machine system is an important research topic in many application areas. One of the key factors for intimate human-machine interaction is the ability of the control algorithm to detect and classify different user commands with shortest possible latency, thus making a highly correlated link between cause and effect. In our research, we focused on the task of mapping user kinematic actions into sound samples. The presented methodology relies on the wireless sensor nodes equipped with inertial measurement units and the real-time algorithm dedicated for early detection and classification of a variety of movements/gestures performed by a user. The core algorithm is based on the approximate Bayesian inference of Vector Autoregressive Hierarchical Hidden Markov Models (VAR-HHMM), where models database is derived from the set of motion gestures. The performance of the algorithm was compared with an online version of the K-nearest neighbours (KNN) algorithm, where we used offline expert based classification as the benchmark. In almost all of the evaluation metrics (e.g. confusion matrix, recall and precision scores) the VAR-HHMM algorithm outperformed KNN. Furthermore, the VAR-HHMM algorithm, in some cases, achieved faster movement onset detection compared with the offline standard. The proposed concept, although envisioned for movement-to-sound application, could be implemented in other human-machine interfaces.