Conversations about basic income, a government-funded salary given to every citizen, used to take place in the dingy offices of extremist left-wing politicians, or in the campus dorm rooms of idealistic students determined to fix the problems of the previous generation. The conversation was about social responsibility. It wasn't an economic case, it was a moral one. A sharp uptake in technology designed to automate jobs and replace human workers is bringing new voices to this old debate. Today's society could be disastrously affected by artificial intelligence and growing automation, and scientists and technologists are looking for ways to stop that damage before it happens.

Virtual assistants are coming of age. Viv, a new virtual assistant with advanced natural language processing skills that allow her to understand complex commands, is set to disrupt the customer experience. What does it mean for the enterprise? In this week's Searchlight, Site Editor Fran Sales details the new AI-powered assistant and explores the potential impact it will have on businesses and IT departments. Having a clear-cut IT strategy is key establishing a competitive advantage over any competition.

There are a lot of major problems today with tangible, real-world consequences. A short list might include terrorism, U.S.-Russian relations, climate change and biodiversity loss, income inequality, health care, childhood poverty, and the homegrown threat of authoritarian populism, most notably associated with the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party, Donald Trump. Yet if you've been paying attention to the news for the past several years, you've almost certainly seen articles from a wide range of news outlets about the looming danger of artificial general intelligence, or "AGI." For example, Stephen Hawking has repeatedly expressed that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," and Elon Musk -- of Tesla and SpaceX fame -- has described the creation of superintelligence as "summoning the demon." Furthermore, the Oxford philosopher and director of the Future of Humanity Institute, Nick Bostrom, published a New York Times best-selling book in 2014 called Superintelligence, in which he suggests that the "default outcome" of building a superintelligent machine will be "doom." Should we really be worried about a takeover by killer computers hell-bent on the total destruction of Homo sapiens?

When everything in the world is data, navigating the data successfully requires technology that starts with and is driven by search. As search has become more and more sophisticated its indexing has become more complicated, its categorization of information ever more deductive. Its understanding of the importance of what it has indexed bounded, as well as defined, by knowledge. In many ways, search has become ubiquitous and invisible. When Google Now lets me know that my "…drive home is 39 minutes" from where I am at a meeting it has taken into account where my car is (by looking at the GPS signal of my phone), the traffic conditions on the way (by using Waze to cross-check information in traffic conditions and possible delays), my own travel patterns (by checking the history of my travelling to and from specific meetings with clients and what I do afterwards).

As video content matures and proliferates and VR content creates new interactive environments and as the way we access software and apps changes and evolves, PVAs or personal virtual assistants will radically influence the interface with the internet and these new layers of content and virtual experience. Viv is just four years old, but by the time IoT and VR matures, she will be ready to make the smart home, smart city and billions of connected devices truly come to life. While we assume it will be one of the tech giants: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple or Microsoft; disruption doesn't usually come from an established player whose interests and investments are scattered. Just as VR represents a new platform of information, content, advertisement, marketing and social media, and digital experiences, VPAs like Viv could represent another springboard to the future.

As an amateur futurist, I'm always looking for how AI and exponential technologies are disrupting human society towards more automated smart cities. As video content matures and proliferates and VR content creates new interactive environments and as the way we access software and apps changes and evolves, PVAs or personal virtual assistants will radically influence the interface with the internet and these new layers of content and virtual experience. The future of PVAs is more like an intelligent OS that acts as a buffer between us and the information noise of the internet. Take your most sophisticated contextual chat bot and marry it with millions of data points per person and algorithms learning from us and how we interact online and in our lives, where we can customize our own experience, and that is a bit like how PVAs may turn out. They will be AI, but truly act as personal virtual assistants.

The pathway in the brain responsible for vision operates in several layers, each of which is thought to extract progressively more information from an image, such as movement, shape, color, and so on. Each layer consists of huge numbers of neurons connected into a vast network. Deep convolution neural networks have a similar structure. They too are made up of layers, and each of these is a network of circuits designed to mimic the behavior of neurons, hence the term neural network. Through much trial and error, computer scientists have found that these layers perform best when each extracts progressively more information about an image. And when they look at the behavior of layers individually, they find remarkable similarities to the function of specific layers in the brain.

Computers are becoming rather versatile copycats, thanks to deep-learning algorithms. Just last year, researchers "trained" machines to transfer the brushstrokes of iconic artists onto any still image. Now, Manuel Ruder and a team of computer scientists from the University of Freiburg in Germany have taken the technology a step further: They're altering videos. The team's style transfer algorithm makes clips from Ice Age or the television show Miss Marple appear as living paintings crafted by the likes of Van Gogh, Picasso or any other artist. And the results speak for themselves.

A very popular style of research in NLP and ML is the math abstraction. You cast your learning problem as some sort of objective function that you want to optimize. Or, if you're feeling Bayesian, you write down a joint likelihood that you'll either sample from or, yes, turn into an objective function that you want to optimize. The optimizer is then typically considered a black box, aside from its hyperparameters which you often must tune. This is a very attractive style of research and one that I've personally gotten a lot of leverage out of.

When it comes to Big Data, machines can only do so much. At least that's what startup Spare5 Inc. is betting with the launch of what it calls an "Intelligent Crowdsourcing Platform" that leverages a community of specialists to process Big Data tasks that require a human touch. Crowdsourcing services today run the gamut from the mundane (Amazon.com's Spare5 sits somewhere in the middle, but its special sauce is a machine learning algorithm that rates the skills and preferences of crowd members. The platform is useful for "pretty much anything that involves getting structured data out of unstructured data," said Matt Bencke, founder and CEO.