Our cars brake for us, park for us, and some are even driving us. Our movie lists are filled with Ex Machina, Her, and Lucy. The news tells about the latest vendor and cool use of technology, minute by minute. Vendors are filling our voicemail and email with enticements. It's all so very cool!

There is lots of debate around the dangers of artificial intelligent machines. There are hundreds of movies where machines enslave us. It seems that humanity's consensus is that we are doomed to be annihilated by our own creations: "Machines that can think." Although I value the research on how we can prevent this I believe that there is lots of unreasonable fear that stems out of lack of knowledge. Things can be so much better in our world with artificial intelligence. Fear stems, most of the time, out of the lack of knowledge.

Vicarious cofounder D. Scott Phoenix: "Artificial intelligence is the next major fundamental technology that will empower the world." Vicarious doesn't plan to have a product out next year. By the time Vicarious launches its first full product, it could be 2031. And that far-distant timeline doesn't seem to be putting off investors: already 70m has been put into the company from tech luminaries including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, despite the fact the company isn't registered as a for-profit. Taking 15 or 20 years to launch a product proper sounds an eternity in a Silicon Valley where fortunes rise and fall in the three months between quarterly results, but Vicarious isn't just working on any old product.

A computer program has beaten a master Go player 3-0 in a best-of-five competition, in what is seen as a landmark moment for artificial intelligence. Google's AlphaGo program was playing against Lee Se-dol in Seoul, in South Korea. Lee Se-dol is one of the game's greatest modern players Mr Lee had been confident he would win before the competition started. The Chinese board game is considered to be a much more complex challenge for a computer than chess. "AlphaGo played consistently from beginning to the end while Lee, as he is only human, showed some mental vulnerability," one of Lee's former coaches, Kwon Kap-Yong, told the AFP news agency.

We hear an awful lot about how artificial intelligence can be used to solve hard statistical challenges – but we hear much less about how it could solve emotional problems. But this field already has a name, affective computing, and one of its leading firms today is Affectiva. Don't miss our biggest TNW Conference yet! The startup is a spinout of MIT's Media Lab, where researchers were working on ways to create new technologies that would enhance emotional communication and, yes, it already started offering'Emotion As A Service' late last year. The company has what is thought to be the world's largest database of emotions, gathered using facial recognition technology to analyze over 3.8 million faces from 75 countries and collating over 40 billion different data points.

The risk of cyberattacks is one of the most dangerous threats facing businesses today. And while new versions of attacks are constantly being born, teams of analysts are rushing to keep up with the latest risks. While many detection systems rely primarily on machine learning for catching attackers, a new AI system at PatternEx depends on human analysts as a vital part of their system of supervised machine learning. Humans 2.0: How the robot revolution is going to change how we see, feel, and talk Robots aren't going to replace us, but by working hand in hand with us they will redefine what it means to be human. PatternEx's AI system is the first "virtual" security analyst team, and can predict, detect, and stop attackers in real time.

I'd had a handful of clumsy threesomes in college, but nothing compared to the wall-to-wall sex fest I had in mind. My encounters with role-playing games were similarly limited. I'd been party to a couple of rounds of D&D in high school because the dungeon master smoked us out and bought us beer, but 15-plus years later I couldn't even begin to tell you what to do with a 12-sided die. So when I heard about the Red Light Center, "the world's only FREE Massively Multiplayer, Adult Virtual World," I was cautiously optimistic. I'd come across Red Light Center during my "first-hand quest for the future of sex."

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.

Everyone just stop right now and check out Microsoft's new Tay chatbot, an "AI fam from the internet that's got zero chill." If you have an account on Kik, GroupMe, or Twitter, you can begin interacting with Tay right now. "Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation," according to the Tay website. "The more you chat with Tay, the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you." Why this matters: The AI chatbot was designed by Microsoft's Research and Bing teams, which will use its interactions to develop greater understanding of natural conversation for its user base, presumably those who think Microsoft's Cortana is too old and staid to bother with.

In 2012, a year which feels a lot like the very early years of the era of data, Wired published this article on Narrative Science, an organization based in Chicago that uses Machine Learning algorithms to write news articles. Its founder and CEO, Kris Hammond, is a man whose enthusiasm for algorithmic possibilities is unparalleled. When asked whether an algorithm would win a Pulitzer in the next 20 years he goes further, claiming that it could happen in the next 5 years. Hammond's excitement at what his organization is doing is not unwarranted. But his optimism certainly is. Unless 2017 is a particularly poor year for journalism and literary nonfiction, a Pulitzer for one of Narrative Science's algorithms looks unlikely to say the least.