Where does true power reside? Is it waving at you from a stage-lit, Presidentially-sealed podium? Or tucked away inside a billionaire's wallet? Can you smell it in a mahogany-clad clubroom at Yale in the smoke of a Bonesman's cigar, or catch a glimpse of its dark feathers perching on the advisory council of a transnational bank? One thing we know for sure: the nature and location of power is changing, and the agents of that change are the Californian technology companies that have the taken the 21st century by the throat.

Olli, a 3D printed, self-driving minibus, to hit the road in US A new maker of self-driving vehicles burst onto the scene Thursday in partnership with IBM's supercomputer platform Watson, and it's ready to roll right now. The vehicle -- a 3D-printed minibus called "Olli" capable of carrying 12 people -- was unveiled by Arizona-based startup Local Motors outside the US capital city Washington. Napster's improbable journey This week the Rhapsody music service announced that it will retire the Rhapsody name and re-brand its service (and the company) under the Napster brand. The Napster name has endured a long journey in the 17 years since Shawn Fanning first created the service in early 1999. I thought it might be helpful to put together a short history tracing that path.

There's been a lot of handwringing about the algorithms driving what we see related to political news. First, a month ago, there was concern that Facebook's news feed results were biased against conservative news, and this week, there's concern that Google favors Hillary Clinton in its autocomplete suggestions in its search engine. The video shows that Google seems to have suppressed the appearance of "Hillary Clinton indictment" in favor of "Hillary Clinton India," even though data shows people search for information on Clinton's indictment more than information on Clinton and India. It points out that the executive chairman of Google's parent company, Eric Schmidt, is a big Clinton supporter and that Google has many ties to her as well.) Search engines and algorithms decide what's relevant on these sites in very complicated ways, and the public generally doesn't know when it gets tweaked. Generally speaking, people want artificial intelligence.

Check out their answers here: https://goo.gl/jpbMy9

Have you tried out a few Kaggle competitions, but you aren't quite sure what you're supposed to be doing? Or perhaps you've heard all the talk in the Kaggle forums about Python's scikit-learn library, but you haven't figured out how to take advantage of this powerful tool for machine learning? If so, this post is for you! As a data science instructor and the founder of Data School, I spend a lot of my time figuring out how to distill complex topics like "machine learning" into small, hands-on lessons that aspiring data scientists can use to advance their data science skills. I especially enjoying teaching students how to perform effective machine learning using scikit-learn, which is why I'm very excited to announce this new video series!

Zoltan Istvan believes that artificial intelligence will advance in 10 to 15 years. Such progress, according to the transhumanist politician, will address all of the concerns of the human civilization, including the slowing down or blocking of the aging process through the combination of technology and human selves. For Istvan, the likelihood does not include in the field of weird science fiction. He thinks that artificial intelligence, which is a computer brain that is capable of doing anything which humans do, is about to come soon, and that the US should develop it first. He noted that the government must have a plan in order to deal with it before the "arms race of civilization" arrives.

This week, Google released a research paper chronicling one of its latest forays into artificial intelligence. Researchers at the company programmed an advanced type of "chatbot" that learns how to respond in conversations based on examples from a training set of dialogue. And the bot doesn't just answer by spitting out canned answers in response to certain words; it can form new answers from new questions. This means Google's researchers could get a little creative with it, and they certainly did - they asked the bot everything from boring IT questions to inquiries about the meaning of life. The responses were alternately impressive, amusing, and unnerving.

In a speech at the 2016 Bloomberg Tech Conference, the former Android chief, Andy Rubin, spoke about the combination of the artificial intelligence (A.I.) and quantum computing into a wildly powerful central A.I. that will power just about everything. According to Android Headlines, in Andy Rubin's vision, just in case, this A.I. would be subject to some sort of kill switch. Given recent progress in machine learning and neural networking, Rubin's vision may not be too far-fetched. Depending on who you ask, the concept of the current computers and smartphones being replaced by a massively powerful artificial intelligence sounds either pretty nice or scary. However, not everybody will be able to have direct access to a quantum supercomputer and use its massive A.I. power.

Robots have already invaded the operating room in some hospitals, but in Belgium they will soon be taking on the potentially more difficult task -- for robots, at least -- of greeting patients and giving them directions. The Citadelle regional hospital in Liège and the Damiaan general hospital in Ostend will be working with Zora Robotics to test patients' reactions to robot receptionists in the coming months. Zora already has experience programming the diminutive humanoid robot Nao to act as a chatty companion for the elderly, offering it as a form of therapy for those with dementia. Now the Belgian company is working with Nao's newer, bigger sibling, Pepper. Both were developed by French robotics company Aldebaran, now owned by Japanese Internet conglomerate SoftBank.

These and many other insights are from the Evans Data Corporation Global Development Survey, Volume 1 (PDF, client access) published earlier this month. The methodology was based on interviews with developers actively creating new applications with the latest technologies. The Evans Data Corporation (EDC), International Panel of Developers, were sent invitations to participate and complete the survey online. Please see page 17 of the study for additional details on the methodology.