Created as part of the company's most recent hack day (and thus, unlikely to ever see a real release), Netflix Zone is a blocky representation of your old school VHS emporium, except you peruse the stacks with an HTC Vive instead of driving to a Blockbuster in a nearby strip mall. Unfortunately there's no esoteric "Staff Picks" section, but the organization in the virtual store does reflect the user's Netflix recommendations and the whole place turns into a screening room when a user picks up a title for closer inspection. To play a title, you apparently pick it up off the shelf and just chuck it at a wall. While the idea of re-living the video store experience is enticing, some of the other hack day projects are a little more practical. Take for instance a drag-and-drop homepage interface that allows you to pin categories to the top, a "Family Catch-Up" feature that reveals how far along in a series the other profiles in your account have watched, and a "QuietCast" feature that turns your phone into a wireless headphone adapter while streaming the video to your Chromecast.

Google introduced a new group dedicated to making artificial intelligence more creative at Moogfest, a four-day music and technology festival in Durham, North Carolina, Quartz first reported. Called Magenta, the group will use its AI system TensorFlow to see if AI can be trained to create its own art, music, and video. The ultimate goal is to see if AI could give a listener "musical chills" by generating entirely new pieces of music, Quartz reported. Google made TensorFlow open source in November so that any developer can use it. TensorFlow works by using deep learning, a process where machines learn to complete tasks all on their own, to recognize images.

"In a future with mass unemployment, young people are forced to sell blood." This is the opening line of a short film entered in this year's Sci-Fi London Film Challenge. It's dark, enigmatic, contemporary…and written by a computer. In fact, the film's entire screenplay is the work of a neural net trained on sci-fi scripts. Once the software completed the screenplay--which you can read in all its unadulterated glory here--it was up to the film's director and actors to make it into something someone might actually watch.

I recently wrote a blog post about artificial intelligence in the auditing industry and shared my predictions on which industries I expect to adopt AI next. The short answer was: all of them. I also suggested that adoption might be happening sooner that anyone previously thought, thanks to an announcement from Facebook last month. If you followed news from Facebook's F8 developer conference, which took place in April, you might be asking, "What's a chat bot?" It's essentially a computer program designed to simulate conversation with a user, and Facebook generated some buzz around the launch of its bots for Messenger platform, which has already signed on companies like CNN, Salesforce and Staples. But, at its core, a chat bot is also a form of artificial intelligence, and the mainstream adoption of them will in turn drive the mainstream adoption of AI.

One of Google's latest projects is the Magenta project, an effort to generate music, video and images using machine intelligence. The big question Project Magenta tries to answer is, "Can machines make music and art?" If this is possible, the Google team wants to learn how, and if it cannot, they want to know why. Douglas Eck, one of the research scientists working on Magenta, wrote that before Magenta, he worked on music search and recommendation for Google Play Music. His goal in this area was to "use machine learning and an audio signal processing to help listeners find the music they want when they want it."

I recently wrote a blog post about artificial intelligence in the auditing industry and shared my predictions on which industries I expect to adopt AI next. The short answer was: all of them. I also suggested that adoption might be happening sooner that anyone previously thought, thanks to an announcement from Facebook last month. If you followed news from Facebook's F8 developer conference, which took place in April, you might be asking, "What's a chat bot?" It's essentially a computer program designed to simulate conversation with a user, and Facebook generated some buzz around the launch of its bots for Messenger platform, which has already signed on companies like CNN, Salesforce and Staples. But, at its core, a chat bot is also a form of artificial intelligence, and the mainstream adoption of them will in turn drive the mainstream adoption of AI.

Google is launching a new project to see whether artificial intelligence can create art. In a talk at Moogfest, a US technology festival, Google researcher Douglas Eck described a project that would seek to understand whether or not a computer can create art. Magenta, which will launch in early June, is part of Google Brain, the company's deep learning research. Eck said the project was in part inspired by DeepDream, an artificial intelligent system trained to find patterns in pictures. "There's a couple of things that got me wanting to form Magenta, and one of them was seeing the completely, frankly, astonishing improvements in the state of the art. And I wanted to demystify this a little bit," said Eck. "The question Magenta asks is, 'Can machines make music and art? If not, why not?'," he said.

The past few years have seen machine learning emerge as one of the trendiest topics within the technology sector as it allows computers to find hidden insights from the volumes of data being collected without being explicitly programmed where to look. The resources available to process it have increased dramatically. One of the exciting aspects about machine learning is that its applications are virtually endless and in fact it has been transforming a wide variety of industries in interesting ways. In this post, I would like to share my experience using machine learning algorithms, in particular how we, at Capgemini, have developed the capabilities to successfully integrate machine learning-based technology into a framework to help improve service delivery in the public sector. Many machine learning applications are all around us: Amazon and Netflix online recommendation systems, Spotify and Pandora's personalised playlists, Facebook's automatic face recognition and friends recommendations, Google's personalised searches and adds, Uber's prediction of customer demand and pre-location of cars, to mention just a few.

Anybody that's been paying attention to tech and the jobs market in the last couple of years has been paying attention to automation, and anybody paying attention to automation has seen this video by CGP Grey: There's a quiet rumbling on the Internet as slowly, people are starting to worry about the future of labor, debating whether mass technological unemployment is the true blue fate of humanity or just another Y2K scare. For those in-the-know, it seems pretty certain that automation will replace jobs, but the degree to which humans will be fiscally displaced, however, is up for debate. Bloggers, writers, and other creatives will argue against there ever being machines that can do their jobs and create pieces better, with more soul, if you will, than a human can. Unfortunately, those poor folks are in for a rude awakening; the machines have already begun to blog. In the U.S. in 2014, 720 bicyclists, 4,400 pedestrians, and 33,000 drivers died in auto accidents.

Can machines ever produce creative works to rival our own creations? Google is hoping to find out in its latest project aimed at teaching artificial intelligent how to generate music and art. Dubbed Magenta, the project was created in Google's Brain AI group, which is also responsible for Google Translate, Photos and Inbox. Google wants to use Tensortflow software to teach machines how to compose music and create works of art. DeepDream, Google's visual AI that could transform photos into psychedelic art (such as Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory, pictured), worked on a similar principle Google currently uses TensorFlow for speech recognition in the Google app, Smart Reply in Inbox and to search in Google Photos.