We're only at the beginning of the development of AI technology and the potential is enormous. AI has become integral to the inner workings of most industries and it's undeniable that it's evolving at an alarming rate. It's been adopted within the mechanics of everyday life and whilst simulating human intelligence is probably not all that far off – will AI ever harness true anthropomorphic traits like the capacity to be creative? Creativity is how we express our experiences. It relies on originality, imagination and the ability to make something not done before.

What if computers could take the words we type on the internet and convert them into a language that describes what they actually mean? Analyzing data pulled from social media would reveal insights into the deeper questions about our real motives and feelings, instead of mere statistics. Pierre Lévy, a French philosopher who's been writing about cyberspace since the 1990s and who is the Canada research chair in collective intelligence at the University of Ottawa, is working on software that can do just this. He's done the math and annotated the entire French dictionary with a language--or, as he calls it, a hyper-language, since it describes words that already form a language of their own--that he calls IEML, or the Information Economy MetaLanguage. All that's left is to do the actual coding to turn it into an automatic system.

A fellow writer recently told me that when he began his career, he was always hunting for a scoop, a story no one else had. Now, with a couple decades experience, he does the opposite. "I look for a story that's already been done 10 times," he said, "with the aim of making the 11th the one everyone would rather read." Lurking behind that notion is an important fact about popular art: It relies on the familiar. Successful pop artists aren't necessarily the most daring or sophisticated, but the best have the skill to take what they've heard and make it fresh.

As what was once mere data evolves into actionable intelligence, the context that binds that data becomes ever more essential. With no context around those four letters, you might not understand the reference or make any sort of connection. But if you add just one word to "java," such as "development," "island," or "coffee," the reference changes completely--and that's with just a single word of context. This is the type of active context and connection that the Brainspace engine provides. "Context is a very important part of what we do. When we analyze documents, we take the context into consideration," says Ravi Sathyanna, vice president of technology and product management at Brainspace.

In a talk in Pittsburgh in 1997, the late evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould allegedly characterized humans as "the primates who tell stories." Psychologist Robyn Dawes went much further, suggesting humans are "the primates whose cognitive capacity shuts down in the absence of a story." To be sure, we love a good story. Research suggests that anecdotes can be as persuasive as hard data, and that jurors are influenced by the quality of the prosecution's and defense's "stories" when deciding whether to find a defendant guilty. Even in science, we seek explanations, not mere descriptions; in history, we want a good narrative, not a mere sequence of events. Or do they offer something more?

Kate Stanners, Worldwide Creative Director, Saatchi & Saatchi, said, "How to build on 25 years of the Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors' Showcase and an archive of incredible directing talent, whilst producing a screening at the Palais des Festival in Cannes which lives up to our reputation as an agency on the frontier of technological and creative innovation? That's the challenge that we faced this year, and we are rising to it by working with Team One in Los Angeles to explore how Artificial Intelligence and machines can be used to enhance human creativity, a subject that is on the creative radar right now."

In a talk in Pittsburgh in 1997, the late evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould allegedly characterized humans as "the primates who tell stories." Psychologist Robyn Dawes went much further, suggesting humans are "the primates whose cognitive capacity shuts down in the absence of a story." To be sure, we love a good story. Research suggests that anecdotes can be as persuasive as hard data, and that jurors are influenced by the quality of the prosecution's and defense's "stories" when deciding whether to find a defendant guilty. Even in science, we seek explanations, not mere descriptions; in history, we want a good narrative, not a mere sequence of events. Or do they offer something more?

Artificial intelligence is a branch of science which deals with assisting machines to come up with solutions to complex problems in a more human-like fashion. This involves borrowing characteristics from human intelligence and applying them as algorithms in a computer friendly way. A more or less flexible or efficient approach can be taken depending on the requirements established, which influences how artificial the intelligent behavior appears.

Artificial intelligence is still not as fast or reliable as human intelligence--which is perhaps a relief for those of you with nightmares of the robot takeover. But now, a new study in PLoS Computational Biology explains why the human brain's enigmatic but effective design works so well--and how we can harness that power to make smarter machines. Hierarchy--the ability to divide units into smaller, functional parts--is the driving force behind every biological system. Our very bodies are organized into organ systems which are made of of organs, organs made up of tissues and tissues made up of cells. But the human brain is the ultimate hierarchical system, with separate areas and sub-regions designed to perform specific tasks for specific body parts.

Michelangelo's'Creation of Adam' as seen through Google's Deep Dream Created by digital artist Kyle McDonald using Google's Deep Dream program. In the summer of 2015, researchers at Google realized they could make their artificial intelligence algorithms dream. They set the programs to not just classify images, but enhance what they saw. The machines showed their interpretation of art. The researchers found they could also set the programs to generate images, giving an idea of how the machine thought certain objects looked.