Scientists have begun actively preparing for the end of the world. A group of experts met in the Arizona desert to discuss potential nightmare scenarios that could take place in the future and how humanity might handle them, Bloomberg reported Thursday. Funded by Tesla co-founder Elon Musk and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, the meeting was comprised of 40 scientists, policy analysts and cyber security experts. The group was tasked with coming up with increasingly likely "doomsday scenarios." "There is huge potential for AI (artificial intelligence) to transform so many aspects of our society in so many ways. At the same time, there are rough edges and potential downsides, like any technology," Eric Horvitz, an artificial intelligence scientist and the co-organizer of the meeting, told Bloomberg.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)

This white paper was prepared by the participants of the fall 2016 long program Understanding Many-Particle Systems with Machine Learning. Interactions between many constituent particles, i.e. quarks, electrons, atoms, molecules, or materials, generally give rise to collective or emergent phenomena in matter. Even when the interactions between the particles are well defined and the governing equations of the system are understood, the collective behavior of the system as a whole does not trivially emerge from these equations. Despite many decades of prominent work on interacting many-particle (MP) systems, the problem of N interacting particles is not exactly soluble. In fact, computational complexity typically increases exponentially with N.

The adoption and application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to accelerate at an exponential rate in modern businesses. As referenced in the 2017 Tech Trend Report, AI is nearing completion of the next layer in technological advancement, integrated into everything individuals and organizations do. This trajectory is predicted to drive cumulative worldwide spending of $40.6 billion on AI projects by 2024 – according to Raconteur. This is expected to create mass opportunity for the pioneering businesses currently investing in AI development. Moving beyond the hype in existing media coverage, this post will uncover the reality behind what AI means for businesses today, in the near future, and beyond 2017.

Scientists at the University of Alberta are cracking away at the complexities of artificial intelligence with their new "DeepStack" system, which can not only play a round of poker with you, but walk away with all of your money. This new technology builds upon the legacy of systems like IBM's Deep Blue, which was the first program to beat a world champion, Gary Kasparov, at chess in 1996. As Michael Bowling, co-author of the research and leader of the Computer Poker Research Group at Alberta, puts it: poker is the next big step for designing AI. In a game of Heads Up No Limit poker, DeepStack was able to win against professional poker players at a rate of 49 big blinds per 100. "We are winning by 49 per 100, that's like saying whatever the players were doing was not that much more effective than if they just folded every hand," Bowling tells Inverse.

We all want a robot butler, but what if that faithful mechanical servant could be turned into a live-in spy, or even a robotic assailant? With the Internet of Things rapidly creating astonishingly wide security holes where none existed before, researchers are sounding the alarm that robots could make our current problems seem cute by comparison. A study titled "Hacking Robots Before Skynet," by Seattle-based IOActive Labs reports that security vulnerabilities run the gamut of manufacturers and distributors. You might not have heard of companies like Ubtech Robotics or Universal Robots, but these are the names that make up most of the nascent non-industrial robot business, and their'bots aren't immune to cyberthieves. These robots were found to be vulnerable to all the cyber attacks you'd expect from a new industry pushing always-online software.

You don't have to think back very far to remember the time when disruptive start-ups and forward thinking businesses were championing a "digital first" strategy. Digital technology had been adopted by mainstream consumers and companies that failed to recognise it were being left behind. More recently, that slogan has been replaced for many businesses by a new one, "mobile first," and is not difficult to understand why. Today's consumers are constantly on their mobile. We use our mobiles on the train, while watching television, in bed and even while we are walking around real shops.

Artificial intelligence startup Ozlo thinks it has a solution for situations where virtual assistants fail in their responses: Getting the bots to ask questions back. Ozlo is launching a trio of software packages for other companies to enhance the virtual assistants they build. They're aimed at making those assistants more sophisticated, including getting them to ask clarifying questions when they don't understand a user request. Current virtual assistants, meaning conversational apps and bots like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, "have this problem with being very brittle," Ozlo CEO Charles Jolley told Recode. He's referring to those moments when Siri says, "I didn't quite get that," or where Google Assistant says, "Sorry, I don't know how to do that yet," without addressing what part of the question the virtual assistants don't understand.

Loyal readers know that I have frequently written about "the dawn of the robots" (which is the title of a Science Fiction book by famed author Isaac Asimov). A recent flurry of articles on the subject of our automated future has more than strengthened my belief that it will be A.I. 1 – Humanity 0 in the foreseeable future. It is not that I don't see the business benefits from automation or artificial intelligence. It is undoubtedly true that the Weather Channel app has become infinitely more accurate with the help of IBM's Watson. And now Watson will do my tax returns, too, courtesy of H&R Block.

Line Corp., owner of Japan's most popular messaging service, is getting into the artificial intelligence market in a big way by outlining an ambitious plan that pits it against the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon. According to a report in Bloomberg News, Line Corp. is gearing up to launch a suite of AI software tools that will enable a digital assistant that speaks in Japanese and Korean. The assistant will be able to converse with users and provide weather and news via a dedicated smartphone app or a speaker that sits on the table and is called Wave, similar to Amazon's Echo. Line Corp., which unveiled the strategy during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, this week, said both the app and the speaker will come to the market between April and June. While Line faces a lot of competition, the company thinks it can stand out from the pack because of its local knowledge about the markets in which it is operating, including South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia.