Artificial intelligence is being used in amazing ways these days. Let's be honest, it's just a matter of time before A.I. affects our lives in huge ways. How would you feel about your business being run by A.I.? How about your books and even films being written by artificial intelligence? Well, one of those is now a reality. Impossible Things, that's a film title you are going to want to remember.

Ford will make a driverless car for ride-sharing purposes by 2021, using its Ford Fusion Hybrids (shown here) as technology test mules. CEO Mark Fields set the target at Ford's Research and Innovation facility here, which will double its staff to 300 and grow its footprint by 150,000 square feet by year's end to respond to the challenge. "This is one example of how we're thinking about expanding our business into mobility more broadly," Fields told USA TODAY. "Taking the driver out of the equation improves the economics for us as well as consumers." Currently, Ford is testing around a dozen self-driving Ford Fusion Hybrids on California, Michigan and Arizona roads.

Velodyne, a Silicon Valley company that makes a critical component for self-driving cars, has raised 150 million from Ford Motor Company and Chinese search engine Baidu . A link has been sent to your friend's email address. Velodyne, a Silicon Valley company that makes a critical component for self-driving cars, has raised 150 million from Ford Motor Company and Chinese search engine Baidu .

Ford on Tuesday announced plans to release fully autonomous and driverless ride-sharing vehicles by 2021. Ford CEO Mark Fields, speaking at the automaker's Research and Innovation center in Palo Alto, also pledged to double the company's Silicon Valley workforce and expand its facilities by 150,000 square feet by the end of this year. Additionally, Ford and Chinese search engine company Baidu are investing a combined 150 million in Velodyne LiDAR, makers of light, detection and ranging technology for 3D digital imaging. For self-driving cars, Velodyne's technology uses a combination of light, cameras and laser-based sensors to assess a surrounding environment and create a 360-degree view that can be used for mapping, localization, object identification and collision avoidance. The Morgan Hill, Calif.-based company wants to use the funding to improve design, expand production and accelerate mass adoption of its technology.

Intel has unleashed a new competitor to Raspberry Pi 3 with its new Joule development board, which packs in superior graphics and wireless connectivity. The chipmaker has loaded the development board with technology found in regular PCs: a 64-bit quad-core Atom processor, 4K graphics, 802.11ac connectivity, and DDR4 memory features. However, Joule doesn't compete on price with the Raspberry Pi, which sells for US 35. A high-end version of the Joule board is on sale at the Intel Developer Forum this week for 369.99. The Joule will provide big-time computing power for robots, drones, smart devices, and wearables.

Mojtaba Arvin is a computer programmer who's fascinated by artificial intelligence . Right now, he spends his time as an information technology student .

Ford Motor Co. intends to have a fully driverless vehicle -- no steering wheel, no pedals -- on the road within five years. The car will initially be used for commercial ride-hailing or ride-sharing services; sales to consumers will come later. Ford CEO Mark Fields announced the new goal Tuesday at the company's Silicon Valley campus in Palo Alto, California. "This is a transformational moment in our industry and it is a transformational moment for our company," Fields said. Ford's approach to the autonomous car breaks from many other companies, like Mercedes-Benz and Tesla Motors, which plan to gradually add self-driving capability to traditional cars.

This is the first in Blue Hill Research's occasional blog series "Questioning Authority with Toph Whitmore." As co-founder (with friend Michael Stonebraker) of Vertica, Andy Palmer ambitiously sought nothing less than to reinvent the database. In 2013, he and Stonebraker moved up the data value chain and founded Tamr, the Cambridge, MA-based software company aiming to provide a unified view of data in the modern enterprise. Palmer joined me for a discussion in which he talked Tamr, predicted the future of enterprise data management, and introduced a rather colorful (yet apt) analogy of which, he admits, his marketing team is less than fond. TOPH WHITMORE: Tell me about the genesis of Tamr.

Intel Scalable Systems Framework (Intel SSF) reduces confusion given the wealth of new technologies now available to HPC customers, and offers guidance for the right mix of balanced and validated hardware and software technologies. Intel SSF incorporates a host of software and hardware technologies including Intel Omni-Path Architecture (Intel OPA), Intel Optane SSDs built on 3D XPoint technology, and new Intel Silicon Photonics – plus it incorporates Intel's compute and storage products, including Intel Xeon processors, Intel Xeon Phi processors, and Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre* software. Benchmarks show that a combination of Intel SSF technologies (Intel Xeon Phi and Intel OPA) provide significantly better scaling and performance when training deep learning neural networks than GPU-based products on well-known benchmarks such as AlexNet and GoogleNet [1]. These and other deep-learning benchmarks can be viewed on the Intel machine learning portal. Intel Xeon Phi processors deliver superior neural networking training performance using up to seventy two (72) processing cores per processor where each core contains two Intel AVX-512 vector processing units.

Forecasting the future isn't easy but some things are predictable. It is predictable, for example, that every now and then everyone will get excited about the imminent arrival of machines that think like people and that will therefore destroy people's jobs. This triggers a mix of enthusiasm and paranoia. But after the humanoid machines fail to materialize as predicted, everyone calms down and gets back to work. In 2016, we are approaching the end of one of those periodic bouts of excitement.