Is it a silly prank, a Pagan ritual, or a genius discovery about the next era of mass transit? In a picture posted to Flickr by artist James Bridle--known for coining the term, "New Aesthetic"--a car is sitting in the middle of a parking lot has been surrounded by a magic salt circle. In the language of road markings, the dotted white lines on the outside say, "Come On In," but the solid white line on the inside says, "Do Not Cross." To the car's built-in cameras, these are indomitable laws of magic: Petrificus Totalus for autonomous automobiles. Captioned simply, "Autonomous Trap 001," the scene evokes a world of narratives involving the much-hyped technology of self-driving cars.

Y Combinator, the San Francisco startup accelerator which fostered Airbnb and Dropbox, announced a new program Sunday for its next round of investments that will focus on AI-related startup companies. "We want to level the playing field for startups to ensure that innovation doesn't get locked up in large companies like Google or Facebook," wrote Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross, who worked at Apple and ran personal planning startup Cue before becoming a Y Combinator partner three months ago. Y Combinator's management clearly believes that there's big money to be made by the right AI idea -- the kind made through true improvement in lives or businesses, rather than zany stock market valuations. But AI research can be costly and take years. To that end, Gross pledged resources that Y Combinator thinks could give two-person startups a chance against the deep R&D budgets at Facebook, Google and other established tech megafirms -- which were once scrappy startups themselves, funded by long-term believers like Y Combinator.

Apple has released a new app, called Clips, that might have secretly signalled its future ambitions. The app sounds like a piece of fun, and Apple describes it as intended to make it "quick and fun for anyone to create expressive videos on iPhone and iPad". It does that by combining photos and videos into video clips, and letting people share them on Facebook, Instagram or any other social network. But the major feature is what it calls "Live Titles", which are described as "a breakthrough feature that lets users create animated captions and titles using just their voice". "Fun effects including comic book filters, speech bubbles, shapes and full-screen animated posters help bring out the personality in videos made with Clips," a press release reads. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Adobe is one of the most well-known software companies whose tools are used by numerous web designers. Many reading this article likely use or have used Adobe at some point in their careers. That's why it's not without irony that Adobe is now dabbling in a hush-hush project that seeks to automate many of the tasks that designers regularly do as part of their jobs. Adobe's new project relies on Sensei, its unified and AI and machine-learning framework. Later this month, at Adobe's Sneaks competition, the new project is supposed to be officially unveiled. The point of the project is to harmonize graphic and web design and machine learning in a way that's never been done before.

Jerry Kaplan spoke with Google's Clément Wolf about the growing worries about the political impact of automation on society, and increasing calls for platforms to try to address precieved threats to democracy.* Jerry Kaplan is widely known as an Artificial Intelligence expert, technical innovator, serial entrepreneur and bestselling author. He is currently a Fellow at the Center for Legal Informatics at Stanford University and a visiting lecturer in the computer science department, where he teaches social and economic impact of Artificial Intelligence.

There are just 10 days left until we close the call for papers for M3, so if you want to tell the world how you're putting artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics to work in business, we really want to hear from you. We can all marvel at what hyperscale operators and cutting edge academics are achieving. But at the M3 conference, brought to you by The Register and Heise, we're just as interested in how the technology is finding its way into more traditional organisations and augmenting or even over-turning established ways of doing business. Whether it's using AI in health or finance, using machine learning to better understand your existing processes, or using chat bots to take the pressure off your call centre staff, we really want to hear what you're doing. If you're constructing an entire new AI-based architectures from the ground up, using custom software tools and high-performance dedicated hardware, we'd love to hear about it.

The Future of Humanity Institute researcher Anders Sandberg has said that we talk about'artificial intelligence' only until it works; thereafter we call it'automation'. How smart, for example, is a computer that can win at chess, Jeopardy, or even Go when it can't extrapolate from its knowledge of those games to tackle something else? Our inner biological supremacists can smugly dismiss those computers as automation. At the beginning of Luke Dormehl's Thinking Machines: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence and Where It's Taking Us Next, 'computers' are people whose actuarial jobs require them to perform complex calculations. By the end, the scientists he interviews are discussing a future in which computers may be a lot like people.

Digital assistants like Alexa, Siri, Google Now, are all examples of artificial intelligence in action. Self-driving cars, video games, music recommendations, smart home devices, and programs that make purchase predictions use artificial intelligence as well. News organizations are using artificial intelligence to draft simple news stories and summaries right now. There are also new, helpful bots that live inside of applications you use every day including Slack, Facebook, and Twitter. These tools create new possibilities and new levels of productivity for the entrepreneurs that know how to wield these helpful ghosts that live in the cloud and on your machines.

Apple has released the iPhone in red, a brand new colour for its handsets. The special edition phone will help benefit (PRODUCT)RED, the AIDS charity. Apple has worked with the charity a number of times in the past, creating red products and supporting it in a range of different ways. It was unveiled alongside an update version of the smaller iPad Pro, and the removal of the old iPad Air. That tablet features a brighter display and improved performance, as well as being sold at an even cheaper price.

Over 25 million Gmail and Yahoo accounts are being sold online, according to a new report. According to HackRead, SunTzu583 is asking for $450 for 21,800,969 Gmail accounts, 75% of which supposedly contain decrypted passwords, with the remaining 25% hashed. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar ...