As technologist Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab and a board member at the The New York Times and at Sony, recently predicted, "This is the year artificial intelligence becomes more than just a computer science problem." This week, the White House issued a formal position paper with 23 recommendations on artificial intelligence. Let me cut to the chase: they don't think superhuman A.I. is imminent. While you're relaxing in the good news, take in the pleasant surprise that the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which advises the President in policy and budget development, coordinated efforts to deliver this cohesive position paper. The outcome is a chunky, committee-clarified read, but for all that, it cuts to the chase on big issues in nontechnical language.

First there was analytics; then there was cognitive computing. Put them in a blender and the result is something completely new: cognitive analytics. "We see cognitive analytics as the way in which the human brain approaches a problem," says Stuart Gillen, director of business development at SparkCognition Inc., an Austin, Texas, company that creates products powered by artificial intelligence to enhance cybersecurity and leverages machine learning technology to predict equipment failures before they happen. "Rather than being focused on one particular technique, where we see a lot of artificial intelligence organizations going, we use a variety of different patterns and learn from them." Developers within corporate IT will play a key role in integrating cognitive analytics services with existing data stores and incoming data streams.

Artificial-intelligence (AI) systems known as neural networks can recognize images, translate languages and even master the ancient game of Go. But their limited ability to represent complex relationships between data or variables has prevented them from conquering tasks that require logic and reasoning. In a paper published in Nature on October 12, the Google-owned company DeepMind in London reveals that it has taken a step towards overcoming this hurdle by creating a neural network with an external memory. The combination allows the neural network not only to learn, but to use memory to store and recall facts to make inferences like a conventional algorithm. This in turn enables it to tackle problems such as navigating the London Underground without any prior knowledge and solving logic puzzles.

Google is planning to release its own smartwatch to take on the Apple Watch soon, according to leaks. The company will make two of its own watches, according to new leaks. They're expected to be released at the beginning of 2017. The leak follows Google's launch of the Pixel and Pixel XL phones. Those are the first that Google made itself – and as such bake in an artificially intelligent assistant that isn't available to any other Android users.

The internet bookmark aspires to be the digital equivalent of the sticky note you paste on an important page in a college textbook. But that's where the metaphor falls apart. If the internet is a college textbook, it's an infinitely dense one, where every chapter covers a different subject, and someone has stuck a sticky note on every page. The problem that nearly every bookmarking site inevitably needs to solve is one of organization. Pinterest does this with boards; other bookmarking services, like Pinboard, do so with tags.

Three key guiding philosophies were presented across the reports: AI needs to augment humanity instead of replacing it, AI needs to be ethical, and there must be an equal opportunity for everyone to develop these systems. Human-machine collaboration in its many forms is major theme in the reports, titled "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence" and "National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan." "The walls between humans and AI systems are slowly beginning to erode, with AI systems augmenting and enhancing human capabilities," the Strategic Plan report says. The White House imagines virtual personal assistants housed in smart glasses, automated factories that assist humans in complex building tasks, and systems that provide better data for farmers, all in the context that these could be job creators and not job stealers.

Mark Zuckerberg says he's ready to voice the Jarvis artificial intelligence system (AI) he built to run his home. One apparently willing candidate stands out -- Iron Man himself. Jarvis, of course, is the AI character that assists Tony Stark's Iron Man in the mega-successful "Iron Man" film franchise based on the Marvel Comics character. Jarvis, which in Marvel's universe is an acronym for "just a rather very intelligent system," is a bit more human as the butler in "Marvel's The Avengers." In response to Zuckerberg's Facebook ask, Robert Downey, Jr., who plays Stark/Iron Man, says he'd do it, with a few altruistic conditions. English actor Paul Bettany voiced Jarvis.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been touted as the next Industrial Revolution, with pervasive connectivity and the insights it can generate offering a new digital lens for viewing and managing the physical world. But in addition to the tangible process efficiencies and quality of life improvements expected from the IoT, it's also a stepping stone to perhaps the greatest achievement in human history: artificial intelligence (AI). In many ways the technological progression of AI and the IoT are intertwined. IoT will provide the information that fuels our data-driven economy, while AI is the engine that will consume it. Though both paradigms are still in their infancy, each's success is contingent upon the other's: The IoT can never reach its potential without a mechanism for autonomously processing large heterogeneous data sets, just as AI is incapable of expanding without being fed massive amounts of data.

Google employee Suzanna Bobadilla wants to encourage more Latinos to pursue career paths in the tech industry. SAN FRANCISCO -- Google is giving 1 million to Silicon Valley organizations that serve Latino students and their families as it pushes to increase the diversity of its workforce. The Internet giant's philanthropic arm Google.org is making a 750,000 grant to Silicon Valley Education Foundation to support its work narrowing the achievement gap and 250,000 to the Hispanic Foundation of Silicon Valley to increase high school and graduation rates for Latino students. Both organizations are working to build career pathways for Latinos into tech companies like Google. Ron Gonzales, president and CEO of the Hispanic Foundation of Silicon Valley, says programs like his are "low-cost, local solutions to this (tech) industry crisis of not having enough diversity in the work force."

Google wants its Assistant to be more than just an order-taking robot -- so it hired some clever writers from outside the company to help make it happen. A new story from the Wall Street Journal's Christopher Mims details the advancements of different artificial intelligence devices like Amazon Echo and Google's rival product Home, and how they're comforting for those who live alone thanks to how personable the AI's have become. For Google, that friendly personality is thanks to a team of writers from Pixar and The Onion who helped make the Assistant -- which powers Google's Home device -- sound more like a human and less like a robot, according to the Journal. Google's eventual goal is to help users build an emotional connection with the Assistant, the Journal reports. Google unveiled its Assistant-enabled Home device last week, a direct competitor to other AI-powered hardware devices like Amazon's Echo.