To promote new sci-fi movie MindGamers, someone thought it would be a good idea to strap a thousand audience members into "cognitive bands". Tying into the movie's debut, the bands will let researchers monitor and record the state of the audience's mind simultaneously during the feature, resulting in a "mass-mind state" image of everyone's feelings and brain activity. Details are thin on exactly what's being monitored, although the screening is bookended by introductory talks and Q and As from experts in neuroscience technology. That may help to distract from having to wear a headband throughout the entire feature. The movie (starring Sam Neill!) centers around a group of "brilliant young students" that create a "wireless neural network" that could link every mind in the world through a quantum computer. However, some kind of sinister threat arises from the idea connecting everyone's brains, and they have to do something about it.

We are entering the age of the CUI, the conversational user interface. Already, there are 8.2 million voice-first devices in homes, mostly Amazon Echos. By the end of this year, that number will balloon to 33 million. That's the prediction from VoiceLabs, a startup that helps companies monitor and measure people's interaction with their Alexa Skills or Google Actions. Skills and actions are integration points between Alexa or Google Assistant and your technology; they are the conversational user interface equivalent of apps on Android or iOS smartphones.

If there's one truth that the tech revolution has proven itself repeatedly, it's this: just because we can build something doesn't mean we should. Take, for instance, Google Glass, iTunes Ping, and Clippy (to say nothing of the smart fork.) Likewise, imagine an app that can take a snapshot of a student's homework assignment, chew on the questions using cloud-based artificial intelligence, and spit out the answers. In theory, this sounds great for students, yet terrible for learning -- that is, until you put Socratic to the test. "Every student today goes to the Internet, goes to Google, to ask all of their questions -- this is something that's happening anyway," says Shreyans Bhansali, the co-founder and head of engineering for the free homework-helping app that's currently topping Apple's App Store for education software. "We read the question, we figure out what they need to learn to answer it, and then we teach them that stuff."

London-based startup Digital Genius is targeting the contact centre with its deep learning technology. The Digital Genius neural network helps agents respond to common customer service queries quicker by first automatically sorting and labelling the metadata and then generating three potential responses, each with a level of certainty attached. Organisations can then set a threshold for automation, so responses the system views as 90 percent accurate could be automatically sent out - like a chatbot - and anything below is sent to the agent to review, for example. The startup claims it can reduce the average handling time for cases by 20 percent. This is especially important as organisations receive queries from more and more digital channels, including social media.

Apple is going to join a non-profit artificial intelligence research group founded by big members of the tech industry last year. The Partnership on AI was established by Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and IBM in September 2016. The organization's goal is "to study and formulate best practices, to advance the public's understanding of AI, and to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society." Bloomberg reports Apple is ready to join the group, indicating the company is willing to share more of its work in the AI field.

Artificial intelligence is getting more than its share of proponents and detractors. But the underlying question for many lay persons is what exactly is AI? Is it humanoid robots assisting elderly populations in their day-to-day routines, or a machine that can filter through infinite research data to create the next life-saving drug? Is it the human-like ability of a system to filter and block spam in the blink of an eye, or a vacuum that knows when and where to do its work without human intervention? The answer is of course all of the above – and much, much more.

This week at the National Retail Federation's (NRF) annual Big Show in New York City, Microsoft is unveiling the latest digital innovations that are transforming the shopping experience for customers – at every step of their journey, across every channel. While personalization, omnichannel and customer-centricity are not new themes, retailers are more aware than ever that competing in today's world requires emphasis on the entire customer journey. Technology and culture change will be required at all levels of a retail organization to provide the experiences customers expect. We call this digital transformation, and many of our retail customers are already embracing this shift with help from technologies such as Microsoft Azure, Power BI and Dynamics 365, as well as solutions from our global network of partners. The hardware and software on display in our booth at NRF this week from these customers and partners are impressive -- including store-scanning robots, mobile apps, intelligent vending machines and smart shelves. Here are some of the solutions Microsoft customers and partners are implementing that use technology in new ways, from the warehouse to checkout.

If you're worried about the possibility of skin cancer, you might not have to depend solely on the keen eye of a dermatologist to spot signs of trouble. Stanford researchers (including tech luminary Sebastian Thrun) have discovered that a deep learning algorithm is about as effective as humans at identifying skin cancer. By training an existing Google image recognition algorithm using over 130,000 photos of skin lesions representing 2,000 diseases, the team made an AI system that could detect both different cancers and benign lesions with uncanny accuracy. In early tests, its performance was "at least" 91 percent that of its flesh-and-blood counterparts.

"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all." Chance appears to name a single, unitary thing. But its genealogy, its family history, turns out to be a tangled one. One way to understand its branching origins is to turn to literature: We may look, in turn, to two very different novels. Anton Chigurh, the antagonist of Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men, forces his victims to guess the outcome of a coin toss, taking their life if they guess in error. That chance is entirely contained, not in Chigurh, but in the toss--in nature itself. This is one source of uncertainty.

Computers are now defeating us in casino table games. Libratus, an Artificial Intelligence system developed by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University has been squaring off against four professional poker players since Jan 11. Libratus is up nearly $800,000 through 80,000 hands of heads-up no limit Texas Hold'em against the four pros. "It's not about the money," said Jason Les, a professional from Costa Mesa, CA, in an interview with The Verge. With 40,000 hands left to play, the $800,000 deficit is nearly impossible for the humans to make up.