For basketball fans of a particular vintage, it conjures memories of a pint-sized shoot-first point guard who reportedly showed up for press avails under the influence of at least one mind-altering substance. Allen Iverson even established some general pop-culture visibility with his on- and off-court exploits. He was a quintessential "good news-bad news" basketball story. Though the former Philadelphia 76ers superstar is now an NBA Hall of Famer, nowadays AI is all about artificial intelligence. But this AI is more than a simple "good news-bad news" dichotomy.

As we are all fond of saying, innovation follows pain points. Are we missing something in our uber-critical search capabilities that needs to be resolved? A colleague recently pointed me to a slim volume "Structured Search for Big Data" by Mikhail Gilula (published by Elsevier and available on Amazon) that argues that not only are our search tools deficient but that a complete revamp of the underlying key-word NoSQL DB structure is what's required. Use Google, Amazon, or any of the other life-critical search tools we've become so reliant upon and you are using key-word search on NoSQL. The pain that Gilula identifies is the length of time it takes the consumer to research and select complex merchandise for best deals resulting from the imprecision of the search results.

In one corner of John Knoll's office at Lucasfilm stand three racks of imposing black computer servers. The sleek 6-foot-tall towers, complete with mechanical switches and fans, flash blue LEDs. Each bears the insignia of the Galactic Empire from Star Wars and a name--Death Star 748, Death Star 749. As impressive and menacing as the machines appear, they aren't real. They're just faceplates wired with Arduino controllers to make the lights blink and flutter like actual computers. They are, in other words, visual effects--and a look into the mind of Knoll, the 54-year-old chief creative officer of Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm's famed VFX arm. They're what made the movies. They come from the machines that spent roughly 13,000 hours rendering digital effects for the three Star Wars prequels, on which Knoll was a lead effects supervisor. The march of Moore's law turned the server farm that created those movies into scrap. "It took a few weeks," Knoll says, shrugging.

It seems algorithms rule the world, now scientists think they have identified the algorithm responsible for human intelligence, if true then it could revolutionise artificial intelligence Little might you realise but as you read this article good chances are your brain is running its "n 2ⁱ-1" algorithm. And who said you couldn't do maths!? Scientists in the USA now believe that our brains have a basic algorithm that enable us to not just recognise a meal, or words on a page, for example, but also the intelligence to ponder their broader implications. "A relatively simple mathematical logic underlies our complex brain computations," said Dr. Joe Tsien, a neuroscientist at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University. Tsien is talking about his Theory of Connectivity, a fundamental principle for how our billions of neurons assemble and align not just to acquire knowledge, but to generalise and draw conclusions from it. Scientists pull images from peoples minds using AI and fMRI "Intelligence is really about dealing with uncertainty and infinite possibilities," said Tsien, "it appears to be enabled when a group of similar neurons form a variety of cliques to handle each basic like recognising food, shelter, friends and foes. Groups of cliques then cluster into functional connectivity motifs, or FCMs, to handle every possibility in each of these basics like extrapolating that rice is part of an important food group that might be a good side dish for your meal. The more complex the thought, the more cliques join in."

The UK's national security boss, Robert Hannigan, should come clean on surveillance and stop attacking technology companies, privacy experts have said. Intelligence agencies must use the debate sparked by Edward Snowden's surveillance revelations to overhaul their attitude to privacy and oversight, said the group speaking at Dublin's Web Summit in November. "What's urgently required is a real cultural shift amongst our politicians and among our civil servants in Whitehall as to the value of privacy: the fact that it's a public and social good, and it's a collective good as well," said Bella Sankey, policy director at civil liberties organisation Liberty. Sankey, speaking alongside the former MI5 intelligence officer and whistleblower Annie Machon, criticised Hannigan for his attack on technology companies, in which he claimed were "in denial" about the misuse of the internet by terrorists, and that "privacy has never been an absolute right". "Given everything we've learnt in the past 18 months, he chose not to address at all the very serious things that GCHQ stand accused of: blanket surveillance of the UK population with public knowledge and without parliamentary knowledge, [and] receiving warrantless bulk intercepts from the NSA on US and people around the world," said Machon.

Earlier this year there was an unprecedented collaboration between ING, Microsoft and TU Delft, with the willing participation of Dutch museums Mauritshuis and Rembrandthuis, to teach an artificial intelligence to paint a Rembrandt. Not to duplicate an existing Rembrandt, but to paint an original one, with a unique composition and using a person who never existed as the subject. The idea was that the AI could analyze and learn Rembrandt's style and then produce, on request, an original portrait based on certain parameters ("Thirtysomething male, black hat, white collar, looking to the right.") Here's how they did it, and here's the frighteningly convincing image that the computer reproduced--on a 3D printer, no less, to simulate the height of brushstrokes: It was called the Next Rembrandt project, and I have very mixed feelings about it. While it is unquestionably an impressive technological achievement, ought we be moving AI into those non-numerical areas of human creativity?

It would be fair to say that a sequel to Watch Dogs wasn't topping many people's wish lists. Sales for the first game may have been high, but it failed to ignite much passion in players. Plagued by accusations of a graphical downgrade on release, and a terrible cardboard cutout of a main character, the game came and went with little fanfare. The good news is that Ubisoft has clearly been listening to players, and have produced a title that is a huge improvement on that first game. One of the problems with the original Watch Dogs was its po-faced protagonist, Aiden Pearce.

Leon Russell called his best-known composition "A Song for You," but a better title might've been "A Song for You -- and You and You and You and You." The heartfelt ballad, instantly recognizable from its opening cascade of delicate piano notes, first appeared on Russell's self-titled debut album in 1970. That's a decade after this singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist -- who died Sunday at age 74 -- moved to Los Angeles from his native Oklahoma and quickly established himself as a go-to session player. Since then, though, "A Song for You" has been recorded and performed hundreds of times by artists as diverse as Donny Hathaway, the Carpenters, Willie Nelson, Amy Winehouse and the rapper Bizzy Bone. In 1994, Ray Charles won a Grammy for his moving rendition of the tune.

Artificial intelligence prophets including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Raymond Kurzweil predict that by the year 2030 machines will develop consciousness through the application of human intelligence. This will lead to a variety of benign, neutral and terrifying outcomes. For example, Musk, Hawking and dozens of other researchers signed a petition in January 2015 that claimed AI-driven machines could lead to "the eradication of disease and poverty" in the near future. This is, clearly, a benign outcome. And then there's the neutral result: Kurzweil, who first posited the idea of the technological singularity, believes that by the 2030s people will be able to upload their minds, melding man with machine.

What better way to create a movie trailer about an artificially enhanced human than to use the reality behind the premise; artificial intelligence (AI). That's just what a partnership between IBM Research and 20th Century Fox recently set out to do, when they used machine learning techniques to produce what they described as the "first ever cognitive movie trailer." You'll have to judge the merits of the result yourself, but what is beyond doubt is this is just one example of the many ways AI and machine learning techniques are already changing the face of the entertainment industry. It's only makes sense that creative industries are leading the pack when it comes to the adoption of and experimentation with AI. Media, entertainment, and advertising are all the on the cutting edge when it comes to the adoption of AI and machine learning.