The concept of inhuman intelligence goes back to the deep prehistory of mankind. At first the province of gods, demons, and spirits, it transferred seamlessly into the interlinked worlds of magic and technology. Ancient Greek myths had numerous robots, made variously by gods or human inventors, while extant artefacts like the Antikythera calendrical computer show that even in 200 BCE we could build machinery that usefully mimicked human intellectual abilities. There has been no age or civilisation without a popular concept of artificial intelligence (AI). Ours, however, is the first where the genuine article--machinery that comfortably exceeds our own thinking skills--is not only possible but achievable.

Countless science fiction novels and films have delved into what could happen if humans created robots or other machines with artificial intelligence. Usually they either become almost-human best friends and companions, or they turn into megalomaniacs with the goal of turning us into their slaves. The reality of artificial intelligence, or AI, is that scientists have developed robots that can beat us at chess, but there are significant nuances that are still missing. Rao Kambhampati, a professor of computer science and engineering at Arizona State University, spoke about these developments.

Geoffrey Hinton, known as the godfather of deep learning -- the tech that helped Google's AlphaGo beat a master at Go -- said the most powerful machines are about a million times smarter than the human brain, and becoming more sophisticated each year. Hinton, who splits his time between working at Google and the University of Toronto, earned a PhD in AI from Edinburgh in 1978. While Google uses AI in its search engines to learn how to return smarter query results, Hinton predicts it still will take more than five years before machines possess human-level abilities. Start with search engines and move the technology into android-looking robotics. The robotics use many of the technologies required for smarter search engine queries, such as artificial intelligence and natural language processing.

Google is once again sharing its state-of-art artificial intelligence with the rest of the world. Today at an event in San Francisco, the company unveiled a new family of cloud computing services that allow any developer or business to use the machine learning technologies that power some of Google's most powerful services. Inside Google, these artificial intelligence systems deftly identify images inside apps like Google Photos; recognize commands spoken into Android Phones; and significantly improve the Google Internet search engine. Now others will be able to use them for many of the same purposes. During a lengthy keynote speech meant to highlight the company's entire suite of cloud services--services it sees as an enormously important part of its future--Google new application programming interfaces (APIs) for identifying images, recognizing speech, and translating from one language to another, among other services.

At the Google Cloud Platform developer conference today Google explained its vision of how enterprises will move to and operate more efficiently in its cloud. The vision: Zero-Dev-Ops cloud computing that "instead of programming a computer you teach it what it [Google's cloud] wants to know and it learns to give you what you want," according to Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt. The vision may sound more like a SciFi movie, but it knit together new and recently announced technologies that Google announced into a coherent explanation. Google plans to bring its enormous-scale data center know-how learned fulfilling 85% of the world's searches with open source software in a serverless secure cloud in which it invested 10 billion in capital equipment last year. It has repurposed open source versions of its highly optimized internal systems used to build and operate the seven services such as Maps and Gmail that have more than a billion users for its cloud customers.

One of the tropes of science fiction is the uncanny valley -- the phenomenon of a robot looking eerily human-like but not quite right in some intangible way. Another is the breakdown in the distinction between human and machine. And a third is artificial intelligence becoming so complex and sophisticated that humans are no longer able to understand or control it. Well, not to be the bearer of bad news, but all of those tropes from the movies are already happening. The good news is that some of these advances have the potential to make our lives a lot better.

We all have memories of high school. Most of them, like the time spent with our friends, are great memories that we will always cherish. However, other memories, like the stress of taking the SAT's, are ones we try not to think about. In fact, just thinking about it now makes me sweat. Being a teenager is stressful enough, but the idea that so much of your future depends on this one test is beyond nerve wracking. That is why so many parents try to help by paying for their kids to take test prep courses, so they will walk in on test day feeling prepared.

Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower, recently wrote in TechCrunch, "There is no question that machine learning is at the top of the hype curve. And, of course, the backlash is already in full force: I've heard that old joke'Machine learning is like teenage sex; everyone is talking about it, no one is actually doing it' about 20 times in the past week alone. But from where I sit, running a company that enables a huge number of real-world machine-learning projects, it's clear that machine learning is already forcing massive changes in the way companies operate. And it's not just being done by companies that we normally think of as having huge R&D budgets like Google and Microsoft. In reality, I would bet that nearly every Fortune 500 company is already running more efficiently -- and making more money -- because of machine learning."

Microsoft has unveiled a new artificial intelligence-powered chat bot called Tay. Developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research team with help from the Bing team, Tay isn't a virtual assistant like Siri or Facebook's M. Instead, it's a true chat bot in the sense that it's meant to engage and entertain people. Surely Microsoft didn't build an AI bot just to entertain people, right? Tay is an experiment to conduct research on conversational understanding. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become incredibly skilled over the past several years but most platforms still struggle with things like language context and humor.

Google will create business tools and products based on its own artificial intelligence technology, seeking to entice more companies to rent its cloud-computing services. The Alphabet Inc. unit plans to offer services such as audio transcription and image identification built around its machine-learning software. Google has used this technology for its own products, and is now making the capabilities available for other companies to rent and access over the Internet. The company also said it won several new large cloud customers, including the interactive division of Walt Disney Co. and Coca-Cola Co. Google is aiming to broaden the appeal of its cloud services to more corporate customers. Inc. get an early lead in the booming market, Google hired Silicon Valley legend Diane Greene to conjure a comeback.