Artificially intelligent self-driving cars aren't a technological evolution that everyone is entirely comfortable with just yet, but computer scientist Sebastian Thrun has enough optimism for all of us. Speaking at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco, Thrun said that not only does he think artificial intelligence is going to reshape the way we live, it's going to do so for the better. Thrun, a Stanford university professor who led Google's self-driving car project until 2014, said that as a result of technological advances over the past 200 to 300 years "we have turned ourselves into superhumans." According to Thrun, throughout history we've used technology to overcome our physical limitations and created ways to communicate across long distances, travel quickly across continents, and gather food more quickly than our ancestors ever could. Now we're moving onto the next stage and thanks to advances in AI the focus is going to shift from "replacing our muscles" to "making our brains stronger."

In 1977 when Star Wars introduced the world to C-3PO and R2D2, artificial intelligence (AI) seemed as fantastical as that galaxy far, far away. But at Ignite this year when Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, took to the keynote stage it was very clear that AI is right at our feet. Instead, their vision for AI enhances the many tools we use already use at work and in our everyday lives! At day two of the conference, I had the pleasure of talking with Alan Lepofsky, Principal Analyst of Collaboration Software at Constellation Research, who was even more excited than I was about the whole thing, Check out our interview to hear more about Microsoft's new direction and what a future powered by AI tools might be like for people and businesses everywhere. Dux: Hey everybody, this is Dux.

Speaking at the launch of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) in Cambridge, science icon Stephen Hawking warned listeners about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and humanity. "Success in creating AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization," Hawking acknowledged, noting the unprecedented and rapid development of AI technology in recent years, from self-driving cars to a computer playing (and defeating humans) in a game of Go. "But it could also be the last," he warned. Hawking himself acknowledges the value of AI and what it could contribute to humanity's future, saying he believes artificial intelligence and this century's technological revolution will parallel the previous century's industrial one. "The potential benefits of creating intelligence are huge. We cannot predict what we might achieve, when our own minds are amplified by AI," said Hawking.

Users are looking for more than the humble SMS text message to communicate with friends and family. Our communication requirements now demand group messaging capabilities with the ability to seamlessly share an image or video on the move. Apple's iMessage, WhatsApp and Facebook's Messenger are leading the way, but the recent release of Google Allo suggests that messaging has become the new tech battleground. Our love affair with mobile apps is changing because we have so many, often over 50, yet on average we only actually use five of them on a regular basis. Searching for an app that is hidden in a folder of apps on page 3 of our phones is no longer deemed productive in an age of instant gratification.

The internet bookmark aspires to be the digital equivalent of the sticky note you paste on an important page in a college textbook. Pinterest does this with boards; other bookmarking services, like Pinboard, do so with tags. Stash gives your bookmarks its own AI librarian, which uses machine learning to automatically categorize all of your bookmarks in different categories: for example, articles, or recipes, or products, and so on. Contrary to what some hyperbolic headlines have claimed, it doesn't streamline formatting to give articles a better reading experience, so if you do a lot of internet reading, you'll still probably rely on services like Pocket or Instapaper.

Siri is about to get a lot smarter thank to Carnegie Mellon researcher Russ Salakhutdinov, who announced today that he is joining Apple to lead the company's artificial intelligence efforts. Excited about joining Apple as a director of AI research in addition to my work at CMU. Apply to work with my teamhttps://t.co/U2hQl2GdhA Although he's not a household name, Russ Salakhutdinov is one of the biggest deep learning figures in academia. His hiring by Apple comes after the company has been criticized for Siri's weak performance compared to rival digital assistants from Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Before working at CMU, Salakhutdinov worked at Toronto University and MIT.

Robotic process automation (RPA) can be the true antidote to manual, rote work, or it can be our worst nightmare if you listen to all the drama or the hype. RPA centers on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to apply human-like thinking to streamline a typically manually intensive process or activity; and whether we like it or not, it's here to stay. Take, for instance, the process of data extraction from documents such as invoices. Application of advanced optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent document recognition can automate a significant amount of the job of data entry typically performed by clerks or specialized data entry staff. Interestingly, human effort is still involved with attaining the ability to hand off a process or task to a machine.

Artificial Intelligence has always been one of the frontiers of computer science research, and it's always important to take a look at the roots of this exciting field. With the death of AI pioneer John McCarthy at the age of 84 being announced, programmers all over the world are publicly mourning over social networks. In additon to founding artificial intelligence programs at both MIT and Stanford, his best known contribution to artificial intelligence research was the Lisp programming language. Lisp stood for "List Processsing," and featured an incredibly elegant programming model. The main data structure in Lisp is, you guessed it, a list.

It's no secret that there is a wide gender gap in the tech industry. According to the Center for the Study of the Workplace, women represent around 20 percent of engineering graduates, but just 11 percent of practicing software engineers. Unconscious bias is one of the primary drivers of this disparity, which has led many of Silicon Valley's leading tech companies to introduce unconscious bias training to their employees. However, it's fair to say that its machine learning algorithms need it more. In humans, unconscious biases are ingrained assumptions about particular personal attributes (including race or gender) that can influence decision making without the decision maker being explicitly aware.

A year ago, Danny Lange took over as the head of machine learning at Uber. The ride-sharing company, which launched in 2009, is, essentially, a tech company: It operates entirely through an app. Lange manages a team in San Francisco, and Uber has a smaller team in Seattle. And machine learning has become the underlying foundation for every part of the company. "Machine learning and AI technologies can really solve some very fundamental business problems that are really hard to create hardwired solutions to," said Lange.