Right now, all across the world, thousands of SEOs are busy working on link profiles, canonicalization, robots.txt, But every one of these SEOs is going to experience a major shift in the industry. And it may not make headlines like the mobile update did. Machine learning is the science of self-programming computers. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides computers with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.

"We have a profound ethical responsibility to design systems that have a positive impact on society, obey the law, and adhere to our highest ethical standards."–Oren On the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on society, I have interviewed Oren Etzioni, Chief Executive Officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. What is the mission of the Allen Institute for AI (AI2)? Oren Etzioni: Our mission is to contribute to humanity through high-impact AI research and engineering. AI2 is the creation of Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder, and you are the lead.

The boundaries between technology and automotive sectors continue to blur, and now Toyota and Microsoft have announced that they'll be working together to imbue cars with artificial intelligence that will, they promise, humanize the driving experience. That might sound like an odd idea given the rise of self-driving vehicles, but it's going to be a little while before our cars are fully autonomous. In the meantime, Toyota plans on making the driving experience more pleasant--and it's investing 5.5 million in technology research to try and get that to happen. That it's working with Microsoft isn't much of a surprise: The two companies have collaborated since 2011. Bloomberg reports that "the new venture will study everything from cars that help each other analyze traffic patterns to user-based insurance pricing to connecting drivers with information and security services in their homes."

Talking to Google is more fun than talking to human, wait, what? That was the thought behind creating CHATBOTS. Let's me tell you what are they? Do you remember asking the purpose of life to Google after having a frustrated day at office? And it replies gracefully, to live forever, that's what it is.

Browse through your Facebook News Feed and you'll see photos play a prominent part, meaning visually impaired users are missing out on a lot of updates from their friends. Now Facebook's engineers have harnessed the power of an artificial intelligence network to describe these pictures to blind or partially blind users. Facebook is calling the system "automatic alternative text" and it's based on a neural network primed with billions of parameters and millions of examples. Such neural networks – vast, complex databases designed to mimic the human brain as closely as possible – are playing an increasingly important role in modern computing. The AI software doesn't actually "see" the picture, but it can compare the objects in it with its vast internal database of similar photos and make an educated guess about what's being shown.

Nearly all games need some amount of artificial intelligence -- most commonly to give the player non-human opponents. But conversations about good AI in games are still dominated by Façade, Black & White, The Sims, Versu, and F.E.A.R. -- all of which came out years ago. Those games are hardly the only examples we can draw from in envisioning artificial intelligence systems. We reached out to several developers for their input on more recent games making innovative and instructive uses of AI. The following list of games are all notable for the interesting, clever, and/or novel ways in which they use AI, and all are well worth a closer look if you're eager to let a little algorithmic thinking improve your game design. The underlying ideas they explore point toward the exciting and diverse future artificial intelligence could have.

Artificial Intelligence is on the rise, but (for a change) I'm not talking about the great AI panic of 2015. I'm talking about everyday AI that's build into vacuum cleaner robots, Siri, web analytics, and your email. Everybody is fascinated by the technology, and it seems like AI is making huge breakthroughs. I'm sitting at the source of cutting edge AI development (pun intended), and as in any other discipline, 95% of the work has very little to do with coming up with amazing new algorithms to outsmart humans. But more importantly, 95% of how well these AI systems perform also has nothing to do with smarter algorithms.

Californian researchers have established that an intimate caress of a humanoid robot can produce a physiological response in a human. They challenged volunteers with a robotic creature less than two feet high that possessed eyes, ears, torso, legs, arms and a voice – and a chat-up line rich in come-hither invitations. "Sometimes I'll ask you to touch my body and sometimes I'll ask you to point to my body," it told volunteers. It was found that a touch where the robot's buttocks or genitals would be produced a measurable response of arousal in the volunteer human, the scientists report. "Our work shows that robots are a new form of media that is particularly powerful. It shows that people respond to robots in a primitive, social way," said Jamy Li, a mechanical engineer at Stanford University in California, who led the study.

The engineers at 1 Hacker Way trained their object recognition tech by feeding it millions of images as examples. This kind of machine learning is called neural network, and it was how Google taught AlphaGo the ancient game of Go and how one of our editors trained his computer to write Engadget articles. The team then made sure that alt text describes photos in a specific order, starting with (the number of) people, then objects and then scenes in the background. People tend to post mostly images on Facebook these days to the point that browsing the News Feed has become a very visual experience. Someone who can't see all those could feel excluded, but this technology could help "the blind community experience Facebook the same way others enjoy it."

An year or so ago, a chatbot named Eugene Goostman made it to the mainstream news, after having been reported as the first computer program to have passed the famed Turing Test in an event organized at the University of Reading. While the organizers hailed it as a historical achievement, most of the scientific community wasn't impressed. This leads us to the question: Is the Turing Test, in its original form, a suitable test for AI in the modern day? In the last couple of years, a number of papers (like this paper from JHU/Brown, and this one from MPI) have suggested that the task of Visual Question Answering (VQA, for short) can be used as an alternative Turing Test. The task involves answering an open-ended question (or a series of questions) about an image.