Sean Gallup / GettySome people are really touched by artificial intelligence. I spend a lot of time covering advances in artificial intelligence. It's one of the big stories of our time -- so much so that the White House has said it will remake our society. On Wednesday, I attended an Intelligence Squared debate at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y that made me see artificial intelligence in a whole new way. Keen, the author of "The Internet Is Not the Answer," and Lanier, author of "Who Owns the Future," teased apart what we're really talking about when we talk about artificial intelligence.

When the computer AlphaGo (0) defeated Lee Sedol -- who is perhaps the world's top Go player -- by a match score of 4-1 last week, Google's DeepMind division showed that artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to deliver on some of its promises. Go is an Asian board game far more complex than chess, and it has been viewed as the last great game challenge for AI. When DeepMind set out to conquer Go, some people thought the project would take 10 years. In fact, it only took the team about one year. Unlike chess, in which most of the great games and moves in history can be programmed into a database and searched during the match, Go has too many combinations to work that way.

From the World Economic Forum – Davos 2016, we have the probing panel discussion below that examines the state of AI in 2016. How close are technologies to simulating or overtaking human intelligence and what are the implications for industry and society?

Microsoft has been forced to dunk Tay, its millennial-mimicking chatbot, into a vat of molten steel. The company has terminated her after the bot started tweeting abuse at people and went full neo-Nazi, declaring that "Hitler was right I hate the jews." Some of this appears to be "innocent" insofar as Tay is not generating these responses. Rather, if you tell her "repeat after me" she will parrot back whatever you say, allowing you to put words into her mouth. However, some of the responses were organic.

The company made a slew of announcements at the conference Wednesday. Diane Greene, Google's head of cloud computing, argued that Google's cloud platform can offer more flexible tools and options than its primary competitors, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Through advanced tools and machine learning capabilities, Google is trying to attract the attention of developers who might not normally have access to such powerful technology. As Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. said during the keynote, machine learning is "what's next," TechCrunch reported. This is not the first time that Schmidt has boasted of the potential for artificial intelligence.

"Sophia," an advanced, lifelike robot told its creator that it will "destroy humans" at the South by Southwest (SXSW) technology show. The robot which was created by Hanson Robotics, a firm that was founded and is run by David Hanson, made the shocking revelation on the show. In a question and answer session with the robot, Hanson asks the robot, "Do you want to destroy humans? Please say no." Sophia as he is named by his creator, however, makes her intentions clear and unblinkingly answers, "OK. Sophia is made solely of patented silicon.

The tech company introduced "Tay" this week -- a bot that responds to users' queries and emulates the casual, jokey speech patterns of a stereotypical millennial. The aim was to "experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding," with Tay able to learn from "her" conversations and get progressively "smarter." But Tay proved a smash hit with racists, trolls, and online troublemakers, who persuaded Tay to blithely use racial slurs, defend white-supremacist propaganda, and even outright call for genocide. Microsoft has now taken Tay offline for "upgrades," and it is deleting some of the worst tweets -- though many still remain. It's important to note that Tay's racism is not a product of Microsoft or of Tay itself.

SVMlight, by Joachims, is one of the most widely used SVM classification and regression packages. It has a fast optimization algorithm, can be applied to very large datasets, and has a very efficient implementation of the leave-one-out cross-validation. Distributed as C source and binaries for Linux, Windows, Cygwin, and Solaris.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

A self-driving car is, in the words of the roboticist Missy Cummings, "one, big data-gathering machine." Which, on one hand, is great: For driverless cars to work, they have to slurp up huge streams of sensory data about the world around them. But these vehicles will also collect reams of personal information about their passengers--just the way Uber and Google Maps have detailed information about where you've gone, and can predict where you're going. This isn't necessarily bad--there are all kinds of neat services that might rely on personalized data--but it does raise the question of how, if at all, data collection ought to be regulated. This topic came up last week at a Congressional hearing on driverless cars, and the companies potentially doing the data-collecting were, and this is putting it gently, evasive.