"On August 29, 2027, at 2:14 PM EST, Skynet, the largest and the most successful financial corporation in the world, conducted an IPO on NASDAQ. As the only human left on staff, the corporate lawyer had to ring the bell. All management positions in the corporation are now held by robots." Does this sound like the trailer of a new Terminator film? In fact, it's only a matter of time before this becomes a reality.

Sam Kronick has a bunch of rocks arrayed in front of him on a raised desk in his Oakland studio. He's an artist and his plan is to sketch the rocks, but not with pen and paper. He and his artistic partner Tara Shi are going to do a 3D scan of them so that an artificial intelligence program can map their contours, learn to recognize rocks and then start generating its own craggy depictions. The project is deceptively simple: trying to get artificial intelligence to make nature art. Kronick and Shi are using a neural net, a computer program loosely modeled on biological neural systems like the human brain.

There are plenty of add-on boards and HATs for the Raspberry Pi that add functionality to the computer, from simple things like LEDs or motor controllers, to sensor suites and enterprise security. The MATRIX Creator is something a little different, though, adding a huge number of functions in a bid to open up development with the Raspberry Pi to IoT and beyond. "The MATRIX Creator is an all-inclusive hardware device that connects to the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi and provides a means for any developer around the world to start making machine learning, computer vision, and Internet of Things applications within minutes," explains Rodolfo Saccoman, CEO of AdMobilize, the company behind the MATRIX. "We see it as being a building block for the democratisation of IoT and AI. Just as how the iPhone created an all-in-one hardware device that allowed developers to unleash their creativity and build amazing apps, which in turn revolutionised the world, we see the MATRIX Creator doing the same thing for a multitude of industries such as smart homes, intelligent buildings, robotics, security, industrial control, smart retail, drones, custom maker projects, and many more."

What does the future of the internet of things (IoT) look like? Answering that question is top of mind for Jenny Fielding, IoT managing director at Techstars global accelerator. In this role, Fielding invests in and mentors IoT startups through the organization's annual New York–based boot camp program. Its third such program kicked off a few weeks ago and focuses on the industrial side of IoT. Fielding believes the key to success there--and in all markets--is artificial intelligence and machine learning that enable action.

Professor Stephen Hawking recently unveiled an Artificial Intelligence Research Center. The Center is set up at Cambridge University just this week. The Center will focus mainly on Artificial Intelligence but will look into "Terminator" style army droids - like in the movie. The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence is looking into the development of Artificial Intelligence for the benefit of society. And that also include military applications, according to Inverse.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Conscious Exotica Murray Shanahan Aeon "In what follows I attempt to...[describe] the structure of the space of possible minds, in two dimensions: the capacity for consciousness and the human-likeness of behavior. Implicit in this mapping seems to be the possibility of forms of consciousness so alien that we would not recognize them." The answer is simple: We're at a unique intersection where the neural nets we're trying to implement are more suitable to analog designs, while demand for these types of AI circuits is expected to explode." NEUROSCIENCE: How Network Neuroscience Is Creating a New Era of Mind Control MIT Technology Review "Is it possible to exercise the same kind of control over the most complex network we know of: the human brain?...'A critical question…is how to modulate a human brain network to treat cognitive deficits or enhance mental abilities,' they say. 'We posit that network control fundamentally relates to mind control.'" TRANSPORTATION: Will Driverless Cars Really Save Millions of Lives? Lack of Data Makes It Hard to Know. Michael Laris and Ashley Halsey III The Washington Post "Researchers at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, in a study funded by Google, dug into the data and discovered just how incomplete the federal numbers are.

Apple is the most successful company in the world. But future success for Apple depends to a surprising degree on artificial intelligence. When you think of Silicon Valley's AI leaders, Apple may not immediately come to mind. But the company's initiatives around AI are "amazing." At least that's what the company's newest senior employee said.

Siri continues to receive criticism over at times unreliable performance although Apple's been advancing its personal digital assistant by leaps and bounds since its debut in October 2011. Google, on the other hand, is regularly praised for its powerful knowledge graph and accuracy. You probably know that the search company's exciting new feature, Assistant, recently made its debut on the new Pixel smartphones. With that in mind, YouTuber Marques Brownlee took it upon himself to pit the Pixel's Assistant against the iPhone's Siri in a cool side-by-side video comparison. Let the battle of the smartphone voice assistants begin!

As artificial intelligence improves, machines will soon be equipped with intellectual and practical capabilities that surpass the smartest humans. But not only will machines be more capable than people, they will also be able to make themselves better. That is, these machines will understand their own design and how to improve it – or they could create entirely new machines that are even more capable. The human creators of AIs must be able to trust these machines to remain safe and beneficial even as they self-improve and adapt to the real world. This idea of an autonomous agent making increasingly better modifications to its own code is called recursive self-improvement.

Just over 65 years ago, Alan Turing famously posed the following question: Can machines think? In Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Turing investigates the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the idea that machine-based life may indeed meet or surpass the boundaries of human intellect. Since Turing's essay and over the course of the last several years, leaders in the technology industry, public intellectuals and mathematicians and philosophers alike have begun to sound the alarm on advances in AI computing, warning of the potential unforeseen end results of placing such super-intelligence "online". Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, shocked many in 2014 when he postulated that the world's greatest existential threat was likely not nuclear war or climate change but rather the unboxing of an ill-considered AI, an act he would refer to as "summoning the demon". In subsequent interviews, Musk has carefully elaborated on his view, still cautioning against a foolish act on the part of those at the forefront of AI development. The concern here is not the advent of super-human intelligence per se- as the benefits of this development for humanity could be enormous- but rather a consequential mistake in the game of expectations, allowing a machine-based intelligence, capable of recursive self-improvement, to essentially roam free.