For such a vital human capacity, consciousness is still a mystery to us. The question "What is consciousness?" has long been explored by philosophers but traditionally shunned by scientists, "because it was considered'spooky' or too vague or new-agey", according to author Andrew Smart. But that is starting to change, with neuroscientists and theorists in artificial intelligence joining the quest to locate what might be called the defining characteristic of humanity. Smart's new book Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics and Consciousness puts forward a tantalising hypothesis: that consciousness is a type of hallucination that may have evolved through the aeons as a survival mechanism. To answer the question "What is consciousness?" one must imagine how a computer could become human, he says.

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) are each pursuing unique visions of the smart home, the home as an ever-connected smart device. Home automation has been around as long as the PC, but is still struggling to find the right user interface and functionality that will make this compelling. The fundamental question that remains is just how smart do consumers want or need their homes to be? Amazon's answer to this question is simple: smart enough to understand your voice. Last week, The Information profiled Tony Fadell and the difficulties Nest has had in introducing new products since being acquired by Alphabet. For those who don't subscribe to The Information, there was also a good synopsis of the article in Fortune called The Mess at Nest.

It's happening in many, if not most industries; its application in the business environment is growing fast. On many estimates, over the next 10 years, enterprise spending on AI technology will increase from 200m to over 60billion. AI is already driving business growth, and rather than detracting from human contribution it will release workers to complete more creative and valuable tasks. A number of leading organisations spanning finance, law, healthcare, manufacturing, transport, energy, education and many more are looking to implement the technologies or have already started! AIBusiness.org has launched the first ever ecosystem map of AI solutions for enterprise organisations looking at vertical and cross-vertical applications.

Pyramidal neurons represent the majority of excitatory neurons in the neocortex. Each pyramidal neuron receives input from thousands of excitatory synapses that are segregated onto dendritic branches. The dendrites themselves are segregated into apical, basal, and proximal integration zones, which have different properties. It is a mystery how pyramidal neurons integrate the input from thousands of synapses, what role the different dendrites play in this integration, and what kind of network behavior this enables in cortical tissue. It has been previously proposed that non-linear properties of dendrites enable cortical neurons to recognize multiple independent patterns.

Flickr/Peyri HerreraAn artificial intelligence director (not this robot, but you get the idea.) Ad agency McCann Japan has appointed an artificial intelligence creative director, AI-CD?, who will be attending McCann Worldgroup's new employee welcoming ceremony on April 1, along with 11 new college graduates. AI-CD? was actually created by the agency under its'Creative Genome Project', the first in a series of projects undertaken by the agency's'McCann Millennials taskforce'. The artificial intelligence can give creative direction on commercials because the data that forms the basis of the algorithm includes deconstructed, tagged and analysed TV shows, as well as data on the winners of the All Japan Radio & Television Commersion Confederation's CM Festival. President & CEO of McCann Japan, Yasuyuki Katagi said: "Artificial intelligence is already being used to create a wide variety of entertainment, including music, movies, and TV drama, so we're very enthusiastic about the potential of AI-CD ß for the future of ad creation. The whole company is 100 percent on board to support the development of our A.I. employee."

Why we don't need to worry about machines taking over the world … (yet!) Artificial Intelligence (AI) is finally coming of age; for those of us of a certain generation the actual application of AI today is the science fiction of our youth in front of our eyes. For mainstream media and general understanding it appears in the popular press as though the machines are set to take over; making us redundant from'work'. The crushing defeat of Lee Sedol, World Champion at the board game Go by the Google designed and built AlphaGo artificial intelligence machine has attracted headlines globally. Far more complex than Chess in terms of possible moves AlphaGo won the series 4-1 based on its capability to'learn' through playing itself numerous times; attracting headlines for its'creativity' and'intuition' in the moves it made on its way to victory. But how clever is it?

YouTube/IPAMGeoffrey Hinton splits his time between Google and academia. Geoffrey Hinton, an artificial intelligence (AI) expert who splits his time between Google and the University of Toronto, believes machines could match human abilities in five years. Hinton, known as the godfather of "deep learning," said the most powerful machines are still about a million times smaller than the human brain. They only have the equivalent of around a billion synapses (the connections between the neurons in the brain), compared to 1,000 trillion in the human brain. But machines are becoming more sophisticated every year.

Oil company Total has almost tripled the performance of Pangea, a supercomputer it uses for analyzing subsurface imaging in search of new oilfields. Pangea's performance is now 6.7 petaflops (floating-point operations per second), up from 2.3 petaflops, the French company said Tuesday. That's enough to put it among the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world, according to Total, which based its claim on rankings published last November by Top500.org, the international supercomputer ranking organization. Total's claim is based on the assumption that no other computer has been similarly upgraded in the meantime, something we won't know for sure until the next edition of the list is published in June. But there's another wrinkle that might cast doubt on Total's top 10 status, and that's what exactly the 2.3 petaflop figure represents.

More than 50 U.S. airports will test a new system to make themselves more aware of drones flying near their runways. Airport executives and the drone industry expect the Digital Notice and Awareness System (D-NAS) to improve safety amid concerns raised by 764 drone sightings near airplanes in 2015. Drone hobbyists are required to notify airports of their plans when flying within five miles of an airport, but doing so has been a difficult process. For one, hobbyists have to track down the appropriate phone numbers. "You don't want to give out air traffic control's phone number on a public website for obvious reasons. Well, how are you going to manage that?" said Steve Runge, division manager of the Houston Airport System's safety and emergency management.

NEWS ANALYSIS: The sadly embarrassing end to Microsoft's public experiment with a chatbot that would mirror millennial attitudes provides some critical lessons about designing machine learning systems.