John Markoff recently wrote in the New York Times, "Misconception: Computers will outstrip human capabilities within many of our lifetimes. Actually: You won't be obsolete for a long time, if ever, most researchers say. In March when Alphago, the Go-playing software program designed by Google's DeepMind subsidiary defeated Lee Se-dol, the human Go champion, some in Silicon Valley proclaimed the event as a precursor of the imminent arrival of genuine thinking machines. The achievement was rooted in recent advances in pattern recognition technologies that have also yielded impressive results in speech recognition, computer vision and machine learning. The progress in artificial intelligence has become a flash point for converging fears that we feel about the smart machines that are increasingly surrounding us.

Artificial intelligence has more than a few practical uses. Whether this impressive technological breakthrough is convincingly explaining the meaning of life or plotting the untimely end of the world, making a robot that can think like a human has been man's greatest achievement… along with the Internet and Nutella-flavored ice cream. And one Taiwanese startup is looking to cash in on this technology by using it to create videos out of nothing more than an article's URL. GliaStudio, based out of Taipei, Taiwan, was launched in 2015. Their goal was to corner the market on the new necessity in media production and content development: video.

Imagine that you are searching for a brown leather sandal online. You know what it should look like, but don't know how to describe it. You search "brown sandal" in Google, which serves up many results--but none of them are it. In 2015, GE inaugurated a new, Multi-Modal manufacturing facility in Chakan, India. If the company's ambitions for the space are realized, it could drive a massive change in global manufacturing.

Get ready for all sorts of updates and announcements from Facebook. The social network kicks off its annual developers' conference, F8, on Tuesday and the biggest topics on the agenda will likely be Messenger and video. Since Facebook first started letting businesses integrate with its chat app, Messenger, at last year's conference, it has continued to give companies more ways to use it to communicate with potential customers. Facebook's thesis is that some people hate talking on the phone and would rather do something -- buy a shirt, order an Uber, make a dinner reservation, check their flight status -- within a chat interface. So, it wants to turn Messenger into a full-on platform for retrieving information and getting things done through natural-seeming conversations with businesses.

Computers have long been good at carrying out assigned tasks but terrible at learning things on their own. Thus all the excitement around "neural networks," a breakthrough artificial intelligence technique that mimics the structure of the human brain and allows machines to learn things independently. Tech giants are using neural networks to do some pretty impressive things. Microsoft is using them to make instant translation real for Skype. Google's artificial intelligence learned Atari video games and then mastered the ancient game of Go, with its AlphaGo program beating the human champion Lee Sedol 4 to 1.

Medicine is often described as both an art and a science. One might think that the "science of medicine" should be fairly straightforward, driven by findings from clinical studies and evidence-based protocols derived from such findings. Yet numerous studies show that a startlingly high percentage of medical treatment is not in conformance with evidence-based guidelines. Some of this has to do with information overload – given that 90% of the world's data has been generated over the last two years, most clinicians on the front lines of healthcare simply aren't aware of some key evidence-based recommendations as they may pertain to the situation at hand. Even before the recent proliferation of data, a number of studies have found that it takes 17 years for advances from medical research to become incorporated into our standards of care. Assuming that there is a knowable answer to each and every medical question, we must also consider the "art of medicine."

Twenty six hundred years ago, a band of Judahite soldiers kept watch on their kingdom's southern border in the final days before Jerusalem was sacked by Nebuchadnezzar. They left behind numerous inscriptions--and now, a groundbreaking digital analysis has revealed how many writers penned them. The research and innovative technology behind it stand to teach us about the origins of the Bible itself. "It's well understood that the Bible was not composed in real time but was probably written and edited later," Arie Shaus, a mathematician at Tel Aviv University told Gizmodo. "The question is, when exactly?" Shaus is one of several mathematicians and archaeologists trying to broach that question in a radical manner: by using machine learning tools to determine how many people were literate in ancient times.

I'm not sure if there's any sort of metric for how successful Aldebaran Robotics' Pepper robot is at working in customer service. People are certainly buying them, but by itself, that doesn't say much about whether it works and whether people actually like it and find it effective. In any case, Hitachi wants to get a piece of whatever Pepper's going after, and to do so, they've upgraded their EMIEW robot for a customer assistance role. At first glance, the new(ish) EMIEW3 looks almost identical to EMIEW2 (which is about a decade old at this point), but the differences are significant once you notice them. EMIEW2 had single wheels for feet, while EMIEW3 uses what look a bit more like rollerblades, which I bet make balancing much easier.

Seven weeks ago, Google made waves in the robotics world with a human-like robot that could walk on uneven terrain, lift boxes and get back up after falling. Such abilities hadn't been seen in one robot. Now Google (formally known as Alphabet) is at it again. Another robot has emerged from X, the company's experimental labs, roaming outdoors on two legs, according to a new video that surfaced from a conference in Japan. While experts call it an impressive demonstration of balance and two-legged walking, it remains unclear what real-world uses Google or anyone could have with a legged robot in the near term. "It will still be awhile before we see these robots in a context outside a very compelling demonstration video," said Brian Gerkey, chief executive of the Open Source Robotics Foundation.

SoftBank's Pepper robot may still be the better-known contender, but a new humanoid device from Hitachi aims to be the in-store sales rep of the future. Called EMIEW3, the roughly 3-foot-tall unit can determine when customers need help and then approach them autonomously, Hitachi said on Friday. Using what it calls "remote brain" technology, the company developed the robot with customer service in mind for use in stores and other public venues. EMIEW3 is actually the latest iteration in a series following Hitachi's introduction of the original EMIEW back in 2005. EMIEW2, announced in 2007, featured capabilities such as the ability to move at a brisk human walking pace and to distinguish the human voice from background noise. EMIEW2 could also use indoor network cameras as "eyes" to locate objects.