We are headed into the most turbulent times of any ever before or after us. Yet it will be exciting, it will be perilous, it is prophesied. The wise will understand and know what is happening, but the wicked will do wickedly and not understand. I write here on Virtual reality, Artificial intelligence, computers, and Robots; along with how all this adds up to the image of the beast in Revelation 13. This article came out of another one I did over on WIBR/WARN Radio.

ACCORDING to some prominent voices in the tech world, artificial intelligence presents a looming existential threat to humanity: Warnings by luminaries like Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom about "the singularity" -- when machines become smarter than humans -- have attracted millions of dollars and spawned a multitude of conferences. But this hand-wringing is a distraction from the very real problems with artificial intelligence today, which may already be exacerbating inequality in the workplace, at home and in our legal and judicial systems. Sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination are being built into the machine-learning algorithms that underlie the technology behind many "intelligent" systems that shape how we are categorized and advertised to. Take a small example from last year: Users discovered that Google's photo app, which applies automatic labels to pictures in digital photo albums, was classifying images of black people as gorillas. Google apologized; it was unintentional.

For the second time in a week, a robot in Russia that is programmed with advanced artificial intelligence as well as an ability to learn from experiences and about its surroundings has escaped the facility that it is housed in. A robot in Russia caused an unusual traffic jam last week after it "escaped" from a research lab, and now, the artificially intelligent bot is making headlines again after it reportedly tried to flee a second time, according to news reports. Engineers at the Russian lab reprogrammed the intelligent machine, dubbed Promobot IR77, after last week's incident, but the robot recently made a second escape attempt, The Mirror reported. Last week, the robot made it approximately 160 feet (50 meters) to the street, before it lost power and "partially paralyzed" traffic. The first time the robot escaped it was due to an improperly latched gate.

It is the future of shipping - and there's not a single sailor on board. Rolls Royce has revealed planed for fleets of'drone ships' to ferry carry around the world - all controlled from a central'holodeck'. It believes an entirely unmanned ship could take to the seas by 2020. Rolls Royce said it has already begun testing the technology needed to make the ships a reality, and expected them to take to the sea by the end of the decade. Cameras would beam 360-degree views from the drone ship back to operators based in a virtual bridge.

During his month-long research residency at the DBRS Innovation Lab, programmer and software artist Gene Kogan continued work on his interactive book Machine Learning For Artists. The book (which is co-authored by former DBRS Innovation Lab resident Francis Tseng) is intended to be a thorough yet approachable introduction to machine learning, geared to an audience with little to no technical background. Machine Learning For Artists is a special kind of book. In its current form it is a work in progress. It exists entirely online and composed in multiple media including text, visual diagrams, videos and interactive elements which can be viewed directly in the browser.

Should a self-driving car kill its passengers for the greater good – for instance, by swerving into a wall to avoid hitting a large number of pedestrians? Surveys of nearly 2,000 US residents revealed that, while we strongly agree that autonomous vehicles should strive to save as many lives as possible, we are not willing to buy such a car for ourselves, preferring instead one that tries to preserve the lives of its passengers at all costs. Driving our own cars might be a enjoyable pursuit, but it's also responsible for a tremendous amount of misery: it locks out the elderly and physically challenged and is the primary cause of death, worldwide, for people aged 15 to 29. Every year, over 30,000 traffic-related deaths and millions of injuries, costing close to a trillion dollars, take place in the US alone (worldwide, the numbers approach 1.25 million fatalities and 20 to 50 million injuries a year). And, according to numerous studies, human error has been responsible for at least a staggering 90 percent or more of these accidents.

Mrs. Gates made that statement at a recent ReCode conference, according to Bloomberg Technology. "The thing I want to say to everybody in the room is: We ought to care about women being in computer science," she said. "You want women participating in all of these things because you want a diverse environment creating AI and tech tools and everything we're going to use." Melinda Gates' comment came after her husband Bill Gates extolled the virtues of artificial intelligence. "Certainly, it's the most exciting thing going on," he said. It's the big dream that anybody who's ever been in computer science has been thinking about."

Researchers have taught a computer to do a better-than-expected job of predicting what characters on TV shows will do, just by forcing the machine to study 600 hours' worth of YouTube videos. The researchers developed predictive-vision software that uses machine learning to anticipate what actions should follow a given set of video frames. They grabbed thousands of videos showing humans greeting each other, and fed those videos into the algorithm. To test how much the machine was learning about human behavior, the researchers presented the computer with single frames that showed meet-ups between characters on TV sitcoms it had never seen, including "The Big Bang Theory," "Desperate Housewives" and "The Office."

Researchers have taught a computer to do a better-than-expected job of predicting what characters on TV shows will do, just by forcing the machine to study 600 hours' worth of YouTube videos. The experiment could serve as a commentary on the state of research into artificial intelligence, or on the predictability of sitcom plots. It also calls to mind the scenes from countless science-fiction movies where the alien gets up to speed on human culture just by watching TV. MIT's Carl Vondrick and his colleagues are due to present the results of their experiment next week at the International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Las Vegas. The researchers developed predictive-vision software that uses machine learning to anticipate what actions should follow a given set of video frames.

As readers of my blog will know, I want to learn more about machine learning. I've managed to run some samples, and I've built my own first little samples. It feels like the next step is to understand more about the different algorithms, for example when to pick which one and how to tune the parameters to achieve the best results. To learn more, I've started to watch the first hours of the awesome courses below. The courses are a great introduction to machine learning and very different from most other videos I found which often seem to assume you are already a data scientist.