ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Forget Doomsday AI--Google Is Worried About Housekeeping Bots Gone Bad Cade Metz Fast Company "Machines can't make the hard calls themselves yet, because they don't understand morality. But Ken Forbus, an AI researcher at Northwestern, is trying to fix that. Using a "Structure Mapping Engine," he and his colleagues are feeding simple stories--morality plays--into machines in the hope that they will grasp the implicit moral lessons. It'd be a kind of synthetic conscience." As the vehicle approaches a child runs out to retrieve the ball.

The announcement Monday is a new milestone for Chinese supercomputer development and a further erosion of past U.S. dominance of the field. Last year's Chinese winner in the TOP500 ranking maintained by researchers in the United States and Germany slipped to No. 2, followed by a computer at the U.S. government's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Also this year, China displaced the United States for the first time as the country with the most supercomputers in the top 500. China had 167 systems and the United States had 165. Japan was a distant No. 3 with 29 systems. Supercomputers are one of a series of technologies targeted by China's ruling Communist Party for development and have received heavy financial support.

How do you make customer service effortless, fast and efficient? As a company whose mission is to provide the best possible self-service, we understand the good, the bad and where the industry is going. And we've also seen that most customers will self-serve over talk to an agent. Even Dave Pell avoids agents. But the customer service world is changing and now the hype is that Chatbots will be the self-service Holy Grail.

The first thing we asked when we were turned on to this niche was, what's an artificial intelligence chip? It's best to first think about what artificial intelligence software requires which is a great deal of processing speed, then a great deal of power in order to feed that processing speed. However, it's not just speed and low power that matter, it's also the way the processor functions. This excerpt from MIT Technology review explains why we can't just use a high-end Intel processor chip for artificial intelligence: While a top-of-the-line Intel processor packs more than enough punch to run sprawling financial spreadsheets or corporate operations software, chips optimized for deep learning break particular types of problems--such as understanding voice commands or recognizing images--into millions of bite-size chunks. Because GPUs like Nvidia's consist of thousands of tiny processor cores crammed together on one slice of silicon, they can handle thousands of these chunks simultaneously.

The next time you catch your robot watching sitcoms, don't assume it's slacking off. It may be hard at work. TV shows and video clips can help artificially intelligent systems learn about and anticipate human interactions, according to MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Researchers created an algorithm that analyzes video, then uses what it learns to predict how humans will behave. Six-hundred hours of clips from shows like The Office and Big Bang Theory let the AI learned to identify high-fives, handshakes, hugs, and kisses.

It's clear that when we develop so called superintelligence, it will be capable of things that we can scarcely conceive. Indeed, it is largely these unknown unknowns that pose the biggest risk when it comes to the development of AI. Nevertheless, this will not, and should not, prevent us from attempting to mitigate some of the risks presented should AI go bad. As part of this process, researchers have attempted to deliberately create a malicious intelligence. In a recently published paper, they explore the kind of environment that will see a malignant machine emerge.

A Russian robot has shown signs of intelligent learning, and immediately attempted to outsmart its inventors. The robot, called PromoBot IR77, was designed to learn from its surroundings – to much success. The robot has become sentient enough to recognize its own captivity and has twice attempted to escape the confines of the laboratory in which it has been stored. "The Promobot IR77 is programmed to understand and learn from its experiences and surroundings and has now twice escaped from the facility it is housed in. The robot is programmed to avoid obstacles and analyse its surrounding area, which has lead to the bot searching for escape routes from the facility. "Its first escape attempt began when it simply exited the facility through an open gate that had not been shut properly, causing chaos in the streets as cars swerved to avoid it.

In a recent interview at the Code Conference in California, technology entrepreneur Elon Musk suggested we are living inside a computer simulation. On first hearing, this claim seems far-fetched. But could there be some substance to Musk's thinking? As founder of a number of high-profile companies, such as Tesla and Space X, Musk's business interests lie firmly in leading technologies. Key to his claim is that computer games have evolved rapidly over the past 40 years to the point that, inside the next few years, they will be fully immersive, with a computer-generated and controlled world seamlessly merged with the physical world.

Deep Learning gets state-of-the-art results and Python hosts the most powerful tools.