It was just a friendly little argument about the fate of humanity. Demis Hassabis, a leading creator of advanced artificial intelligence, was chatting with Elon Musk, a leading doomsayer, about the perils of artificial intelligence. They are two of the most consequential and intriguing men in Silicon Valley who don't live there. Hassabis, a co-founder of the mysterious London laboratory DeepMind, had come to Musk's SpaceX rocket factory, outside Los Angeles, a few years ago. They were in the canteen, talking, as a massive rocket part traversed overhead.

In the next decade, it is predicted that humans' relationship with artificial intelligence will have evolved from a limited influence to a steadfast dependency. Imagine a world where virtual personal assistants (VPAs), such as Siri, Echo and Google Assistant are as ubiquitous as electricity and as dependable as a best friend (Florence 2015). These AIs (artificial intelligence) will be driving cars, caring for elderly citizens, teaching students and may even deliver medical diagnoses (Stephenson 2016). These assistants will be so thoroughly enmeshed in people's everyday decision-making, that they may very well be making decisions themselves! But how will this all happen?

Grindr is coming of age. Over the weekend, the app founded by Joel Simkhai celebrated its 8th birthday. Almost a decade and more than 10 million app users worldwide later, the company is eager to get rid of its "gay hookup app" image, and establish itself as a lifestyle brand instead. Following a much buzzed-about partnership with designer J.W. Anderson in 2016, plus a Paris fashion week party earlier this year, the company will launch its online magazine titled Into, today. The media platform required a full year of preparations and is headed by former Wonderland magazine Production Director, Oly Innes.

People sometimes think of artificial intelligence (AI) as the natural language processing they saw in HAL 9000 in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey or the chess-playing computer Deep Blue that beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. Others see AI as the synthetic human intelligence engineered into a friendly voice interface and software, like Apple's Siri. By contrast, in the enterprise environment, AI for customer marketing offers a far more practical, personal, immediate and business-oriented application. Effective customer marketing is about analyzing billions of signals and automating analytics on a bottom-up basis. It results in highly personal marketing, pairing the right product and offer at the right time to a defined group of people.

There was a point in time where brands were the aspiration, but in our new world, brands have become entirely subservient to people. The explosion in data availability and advances in AI are changing the relationship brands have with their customers. In the past, deregulation and access to marketing tools gave way for the proliferation of commoditised services. A hyper-competitive world, where choice is abundant was born. Surviving meant optimising quality for lower the cost.

That restriction has been removed -- Microsoft says that you can ask Cortana questions, set reminders and basically do anything else you might usually ask the app direct from the lock screen. Microsoft has also made some updates to the default Cortana home screen, showing glanceable info like weather, upcoming calendar items, commute times and so forth. It sounds handy, but given that Android basically does this in the Google Search search app, it's also a bit redundant. For those that use Cortana a lot on their Windows computers and want easy access to that info on their phone, though, this updated app should do the trick. The latest version of Cortana for Android is available now in the Google Play Store.

Intelligent personal assistants are being tested at Marriott hotels, pointing to a future of automated hotel rooms. Marriott International, one of the world's largest hotel chains, is testing iPads running Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa-powered Echo at its Aloft hotel in Boston's Seaport district, according to a report in Bloomberg. Both of those technologies are based on artificial intelligence (AI) that responds to voice commands. The devices would be used to operate lights in the room, control room temperature, and interface with the TV via voice commands. "This is about what next-generation travelers might want and how they would use their own devices at home and how that would translate to their travel experience," Toni Stoeckl, Global Brand Leader, Lifestyle Brands at Marriott International, told Fox News in a phone interview.

Fandango uses them to communicate with movie fans. Dominos offers them to help customers order pizza. And Nordstrom utilizes them to help shoppers customize gift ideas. They're called "chatbots," and they've now infiltrated the real estate space, making it easier to hunt for a home or rental unit or list your property for sale. Chatbots are artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistants (VAs), found within messaging apps or websites, that automatically respond to consumers' requests and provide information via chat or text.

The idea of a tax on robots was raised last May in a draft report to the European parliament prepared by MEP Mady Delvaux from the committee on legal affairs. Emphasising how robots could boost inequality, the report proposed that there might be a "need to introduce corporate reporting requirements on the extent and proportion of the contribution of robotics and AI to the economic results of a company for the purpose of taxation and social security contributions". The public reaction to Delvaux's proposal has been overwhelmingly negative, with the notable exception of Bill Gates, who endorsed it. But we should not dismiss the idea out of hand. In just the past year, we have seen the proliferation of devices such as Google Home and Amazon Echo Dot (Alexa), which replace some aspects of household help. Likewise, the Delphi and nuTonomy driverless taxi services in Singapore have started to replace taxi drivers.

It was just a friendly little argument about the fate of humanity. Demis Hassabis, a leading creator of advanced artificial intelligence, was chatting with Elon Musk, a leading doomsayer, about the perils of artificial intelligence. They are two of the most consequential and intriguing men in Silicon Valley who don't live there. Hassabis, a co-founder of the mysterious London laboratory DeepMind, had come to Musk's SpaceX rocket factory, outside Los Angeles, a few years ago. They were in the canteen, talking, as a massive rocket part traversed overhead. Musk explained that his ultimate goal at SpaceX was the most important project in the world: interplanetary colonization. Hassabis replied that, in fact, he was working on the most important project in the world: developing artificial super-intelligence. Musk countered that this was one reason we needed to colonize Mars--so that we'll have a bolt-hole if A.I. goes rogue and turns on humanity. Amused, Hassabis said that A.I. would simply follow humans to Mars. This did nothing to soothe Musk's anxieties (even though he says there are scenarios where A.I. wouldn't follow). An unassuming but competitive 40-year-old, Hassabis is regarded as the Merlin who will likely help conjure our A.I. children. The field of A.I. is rapidly developing but still far from the powerful, self-evolving software that haunts Musk. Facebook uses A.I. for targeted advertising, photo tagging, and curated news feeds. Microsoft and Apple use A.I. to power their digital assistants, Cortana and Siri. Google's search engine from the beginning has been dependent on A.I. All of these small advances are part of the chase to eventually create flexible, self-teaching A.I. that will mirror human learning. Some in Silicon Valley were intrigued to learn that Hassabis, a skilled chess player and former video-game designer, once came up with a game called Evil Genius, featuring a malevolent scientist who creates a doomsday device to achieve world domination.