Humans have been taking a beating from computers lately. The 4-1 defeat of Go grandmaster Lee Se-Dol by Google's AlphaGo artificial intelligence (AI) is only the latest in a string of pursuits in which technology has triumphed over humanity. Self-driving cars are already less accident-prone than human drivers, the TV quiz show Jeopardy! is a lost cause, and in chess humans have fallen so woefully behind computers that a recent international tournament was won by a mobile phone. There is a real sense that this month's human vs AI Go match marks a turning point. Go has long been held up as requiring levels of human intuition and pattern recognition that should be beyond the powers of number-crunching computers.

As if Minecraft wasn't already popular enough, it is now being used to help artificial intelligence. Well, at least, a mod of the game by Microsoft is going to. Katja Hofmann and her team of colleagues at Microsoft have created a platform called AIX, which is a mod of Minecraft. The company intends for this system to help artificial intelligence agents have a better understanding of general intelligence. For those of you who are not aware, artificial intelligence is rapidly growing and has improved leaps and bounds of the years.

Machine learning is already a very big deal. It's here, and it's in use in far more businesses than you might suspect. A few months back, I decided to take a deep dive into this topic to learn more about it. In today's post, I'll dive into a certain amount of technical detail about how it works, but I also plan to discuss its practical impact on SEO and digital marketing. For reference, check out Rand Fishkin's presentation about how we've entered into a two-algorithm world.

In January, the hedge fund Aidyia started trading on the stock market using an artificially intelligent algorithm. Hedge funds are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence in order to spot trends to try to make money for their customers. BBC Click spoke to Ben Goertzel about his hopes for the future of the company.

Almost half of U.S. jobs may one day be automated. For some employees who worked at a free on-demand concierge, that day came last month. For about a year, Sam Fox-Hartin had worked for an on-demand concierge startup called GoButler as a "Hero," the company's term for employees who field users' requests, via text message, and then complete tasks such as booking tables at restaurants, scheduling appointments, or ordering food for delivery on their behalf. Most of these tasks, like the ones I watched Fox-Hartin maneuver when GoButler invited me to visit its New York headquarters last year, were fairly routine. But he also wrote poems.

A Google artificial intelligence program has beaten the European champion of the board game Go. The Chinese game is viewed as a much tougher challenge than chess for computers because there are many more ways a Go match can play out. The tech company's DeepMind division said its software had beaten its human rival five games to nil. One independent expert called it a breakthrough for AI with potentially far-reaching consequences. The achievement was announced to coincide with the publication of a paper, in the scientific journal Nature, detailing the techniques used.

These days, Google is making headlines as its artificial intelligence (AI) AlphaGo beated top pro Go player Lee Se-dol 2:0 in a highly publicized five-game Go series. The internet search giant is expanding its AI business by taking over four robotics companies including DeepMind which designed AlphaGo. But in Korea, AI is an underdeveloped and poorly invested sector. "Korean companies have not made much progress in AI research. They still have a long way to go in terms of AI commercialization," said Jin Jeong-yeol, director of the Kohyoung Technology.

Henri Waelbroeck seems to fit the popular image of the scientist transplanted into the world of high finance and hedge fund trading, the sort of stereotype found in books like "The Fear Index" by Robert Harris. Waelbroeck, director of research at machine learning-enhanced trade execution system Portware, was previously a professor at the Institute of Nuclear Sciences at the National University of Mexico (UNAM). His areas of expertise include: complex systems science, quantum gravity theories, genetic algorithms, artificial neural networks, chaos theory. The impression Waelbroeck conveys is one of precision. He explains that algorithms have grown in complexity since being introduced to the world of trading around 2000. This has made it increasingly difficult for traders to understand each vendor's full algorithm platform and how to optimally select an algorithm for each particular trade that comes in from a portfolio manager.

If you were tweeting and drinking between July 2013 to 2014, your tweets might have been used as part of an experiment by computer science students at the University of Rochester. Nabil Hossain and colleagues trained a computer to identify alcohol-related tweets and used the data to monitor alcohol-related activity in a particular area. The research could help with understanding and responding to public health issues, according to the authors of the study. The researchers collected more than 11,000 geotagged tweets from New York City and Monroe County, where Rochester is located, in the northern part of the state. They filtered all of the tweets that mentioned alcohol-related words such as beer, drunk, hangover, wasted or party (as well as variations such as "druuuuuunk").

Fast, novel, automated: threats are routinely getting past traditional security tools. Security now, more than ever, needs to be top of the CEO's agenda. We are seeing a host of new, innovative threats attacking companies on a daily basis. A recent example, detected by Darktrace's'immune system' approach, highlights how machine learning can help in this new era of advanced threat. Within a week of installing threat detection software into one customer's security stack, Darktrace discovered a serious compromise.