A startup called Heek wants to make building websites as simple as chatting over text and answering a few questions. Using a conversational interface, the bot asks you questions about yourself, your business and your site, then lets you click to see different designs you can customize to meet your needs. The bot will even prompt you to save your work, as you get further into the site creation process. Many of today's chatbots have fallen short when it comes being a more efficient way of interacting with a web service, and often lead to frustrating experiences due to their restrictive nature. But in Heek's case, the idea of turning website creation into something that can be handled conversationally could appeal to the small business owner who doesn't have the funds for a professional designer, nor the technical chops to manage website creation – even via the more basic website builders that are on the market today.

While Google and Tesla duke it out for autonomous driving supremacy -- and Apple waits in the wings -- Nvidia might actually offer the best solution. Unlike the traditional approach to autonomous driving, Nividia is teaching its card to drive the same way driving instructors taught each of us. Rather than relying on programming alone, Nvidia's AI is fully capable of learning just by watching human drivers -- for better or worse. Dubbed'BB-8' (Disney is not going to be happy about that naming choice), the program doesn't share the challenges faced by current self-driving technology. Blind corners, hard turns, construction zones and traveling on uncharted roads offers a fair bit of difficulty for Google's autonomous driver.

Artificial intelligence ushers in technology disruption: AI era Artificial intelligence software solutions will likely be the top disruptor in technology in the next decade, like smartphones and the cloud. Software's ability to self-learn by processing data may spur consumer and enterprise applications. Companies embracing AI may get a competitive edge; ones that don't run the risk of being disrupted and phased out. AI is nascent, but the pace of innovation and disruptive potential of startups will accelerate as compute costs shrink and machine-learning algorithms advance.

James Lovelock's parting words last time we met were: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky, it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan." It was early 2008, and the distinguished scientist was predicting imminent and irreversible global warming, which would soon make large parts of the planet uninhabitably hot or put them underwater. The fashionable hope that windfarms or recycling could prevent global famine and mass migration was, he assured me, a fantasy; it was too late for ethical consumption to save us. Before the end of this century, 80% of the world's population would be wiped out.

Some of the world's biggest tech companies are teaming up to address the future of artificial intelligence and how it will affect privacy, safety, interoperability and collaboration between people and AI. Amazon, Google's DeepMind division, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft have founded the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (PAI) to consider how and why AI developments, such as online facial recognition, might be a cause for concern. "Every new technology brings transformation, and transformation sometimes also causes fear in people who don't understand the transformation. One of the purposes of this group is really to explain and communicate the capabilities of AI, specifically the dangers and the basic ethical questions," said Yann LeCun, Facebook's director of AI. LeCun advises that the group will foster communication among those who build AI, bring in additional opinions from academia and civil society and inform the public on the progress of AI.

A recent explosion of neuroscience techniques is driving substantial advances in our understanding of the brain. Combined with developments in engineering, machine learning and computing this flowering has helped us enhance our cognitive abilities and potential. In fact, new research into the extraordinary machine in our skulls is helping us keep pace with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. Exciting new advances are everywhere, but worth putting front and centre are findings made in the relatively new area of social neuroscience. Research by Molly Crockett at Oxford University has demonstrated how we might influence the social brain and examine the effects of neurotransmitters, such as serotonin, and hormones, such as oxytocin, on social cognition and social interactions. This includes the most fundamental aspects of our daily lives: trust, punishment, moral judgement, conformity and empathy.

A wrong landing could be all it takes to break a robot. To protect our robot friends from their inevitable falls, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are creating customizable shock-absorbent padding. The team's "Programmable Viscoelastic Material" (PVM) technique allows users to digitally program every part of a 3D-printed object to exact levels of stiffness and elasticity. "We can make really effective dampers and those dampers can be tailored exactly to the application by controlling the amount of liquid and solid," one of the researchers, Robert MacCurdy, told Quartz. Although viscoelastics like rubber and plastic are cheap, compact, and readily available, they can prove hard to customize to specific levels of damping, which can reduce the rebound after impact.

The new robot from Japanese automaker Toyota Motor Corp. can't do much but chatter in a high-pitched voice. But the 390, 4-inch-tall, doll-like Kirobo Mini -- whose name comes from "kibo," or "hope," and "robot" -- supposedly has the smarts of a 5-year-old. Fuminori Kataoka, general manager in charge of the project, says its value is emotional, going from home to car to the outdoors as a faithful companion, although the owner must do all the walking and driving. Preorders start later this year. Shipments are set for next year.

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) recently created a new AI and Research Group, staffed by 5,000 engineers and computer scientists, as its fourth engineering group alongside Windows, Office, and Azure. The new division merges its Microsoft Research and Information Platform Groups with the teams working on Bing, Cortana, robotics, and "ambient computing" environments, which are responsive to the presence of people. The group will be led by Harry Shum, a 20-year Microsoft veteran who previously served as the company's Executive VP of Technology and Research. Microsoft stated that the group will use a "four-pronged approach" to "democratize AI": by offering intelligent services in "agents" like Cortana, infusing applications with features like Skype translate, adding services with facial recognition and machine analytics, and expanding its cloud infrastructure to "build the world's most powerful supercomputer with Azure." At Microsoft's Ignite conference in late September, CEO Satya Nadella declared that "AI is at the intersection of our ambitions."

Tech behemoths Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon announced this week that they are teaming up to develop new standards for Artificial Intelligence (AI). Soon AI will change everything from warfare to our bodies. But we don't want to become slaves to the robots, so how do we stop the Terminators? A great deal of money going into AI is invested by defence companies. We need to put a complete ban on autonomous weapons, at least until we know for sure that they can apply the rules of war as well as humans.