The scenarios sound like they belong to the plot of a science fiction film. From'enslaving mankind' to'destroying the universe', a checklist of worst case outcomes for AI has been created to help safeguard humanity against disaster. The list was drawn up by computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy and entrepreneur Federico Pistono – and they say, as far-fetched as they may sound, we need to take the threats seriously. The list of how AI could turn evil was drawn up by computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy and entrepreneur Federico Pistono – and they say, as far-fetched as they may sound, we need to take the threats seriously. Pictured is a scene from the 2015 film, 'Terminator: Genisys' This can be accomplished through forced cryonics or concentration camps.

Google's new artificial intelligence (AI) software will be able to produce original music and art. The search giant's new project, named Magenta, is due for public launch at the start of June, but was unveiled at the Moogfest art and technology festival by Douglas Eck, a researcher from the company's Google Brain AI division. As Quartz reports, Magenta was inspired by DeepDream, a product Google released last year which could turn the most ordinary of images into a trippy, surreal hellscape. DeepDream is an image recognising software turned up to 11. Google trains its computers to describe images, but DeepDream deliberately over-interprets these images, picking out normally meaningless elements and exaggerating them. After being run through the program, a picture of a wandering cloud may turn into a bizarre fish, or a many-headed dog.

I was chatting with an old friend yesterday and he reminded me of a conversation we had nearly 50 years ago. I tried to explain to him what I did for living and he was trying to understand why getting computers to understand was more complicated than key word analysis. I explained about concepts underlying sentences and explained that sentences used words but that people really didn't use words in their minds except to get to the underlying ideas and that computers were having a hard time with that. Fifty years later, key words are still dominating the thoughts of people who try to get computers to deal with language. But, this time, the key word people have deceived the general public by making claims that this is thinking, that AI is here, and that, by the way we should be very afraid, or very excited, I forget which.

Google is launching a new artificial intelligence group called "Magenta" to see if computers can create their own masterpieces, according to Quartz. The group was reportedly outlined on Sunday by Douglas Eck, a researcher at Google Brain (one of Google's well-established AI divisions), at the Moogfest tech and music festival in Durham, North Carolina. Magenta, due to launch more publicly at the start of June, will reportedly aim to establish whether AIs can be trained to create original pieces of music, art, or video. In order to determine whether this is possible, the Magenta team will use TensorFlow -- a software library for machine intelligence that Google built and opened up to the public at the end of last year. The first product to be released by Magenta will be a simple program that's designed to help researchers import music data from MIDI music files into TensorFlow, according to Quartz.

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.

When it comes to women and emojis, it can feel a bit like the 1950s got trapped in your keyboard. The "femoji" are all girly girls; they get their nails done, get haircuts, get married, and dress up as dancing Playboy bunnies .. Meanwhile "menmoji" are policemen, construction workers and cyclists .. There have been many suggestions as to how best to change the emoji-optics. Michelle Obama tweeted that she'd like to see an emoji of a girl studying. Always and Bodyform, the feminine hygiene companies, have both launched campaigns to introduce less stereotypical emoji. In Bodyform's case these revolve around periods and include an angry-PMS-face emoji, which isn't stereotypical at all.

Google's artificial intelligence has already taken on the form of a human nerd, but now it's time for its next act. Can AI be an artist? Douglas Eck, a researcher working on Google Brain, recently revealed that the team will soon launch a new project called Magenta. Though it took some inspiration from DeepDream, another Google Brain scheme that yielded trippy-as-hell images (amongst other things), Magenta has one key difference: It will try to figure out if computers can actually create art, instead of reproducing or distorting it. Magenta is set to launch in a more official capacity in early June, but Eck provided some early insights during a recent discussion at Moogfest, a music, art and technology festival.

"Artificial intelligence is the art and science of making machines intelligent," Corrado explained. According to Corrado, the brain's billions of neurons all make tiny decisions based on small amounts of information, but working together they can perform advanced thinking tasks. Moving back to the image recognition example, Corrado explained that these artificial neurons will individually scan tiny patches of pixels in an image and make some judgment about them. Asked how machine learning works for things like booking a movie ticket -- a task Google's AI-powered Google Assistant performed during CEO Sundar Pichai's keynote -- Corrado explained that parts of that task were not done by AI.

As news organizations scramble for ways to cut costs, robot video conferencing is one tool that could dramatically expand reporters' access to events and previously unaccommodating government agencies. There's nothing new about using video conferencing -- the business is booming and is expected to reach 2.9 billion in revenue by 2020. But robots, used in video conferencing mode as a journalism tool, could dramatically alter the industry at large. Imagine a bureau of robots in Afghanistan, or in a highly secured building like the Pentagon, stationed at the White House -- or, locally, the State House. Reporters could, functionally, be present for hearings, briefings and interviews -- and multi-tasking -- when they are not able to be physically present.

We live in a world of information abundance. The ability to create, produce, market and distribute content in almost any form has becoming very easy. So easy that a shocking amount of what we're reading is created not by humans, but by computer algorithms - perhaps even this post;). In the most recent post on strategy4telcomediatech I highlighted the need to consider the role that'bots' play particularly in automating conversational commerce - 'sales and service'. In this post I take a look at the use of'bots' or algorithmic content in digital media, how it is shaping our consumption habits, content creation and some of the capabilities required in both traditional and new media organisations. Algorithms and natural language generators have been around for a while.