There is lots of debate around the dangers of artificial intelligent machines. There are hundreds of movies where machines enslave us. It seems that humanity's consensus is that we are doomed to be annihilated by our own creations: "Machines that can think." Although I value the research on how we can prevent this I believe that there is lots of unreasonable fear that stems out of lack of knowledge. Things can be so much better in our world with artificial intelligence. Fear stems, most of the time, out of the lack of knowledge.

Driverless cars of the sort Google is developing are supposed to be more efficient vehicles. Advocates say they're safer, too, despite minor accidents so far. "The autonomous car doesn't drink, doesn't do drugs, doesn't text while driving, doesn't get road rage," Bob Lutz, former General Motors vice chairman, told CNBC in a 2014 interview. Teenagers can do all of those things. As The New York Times recently pointed out, they're also liable to ride with distracting friends.

Vicarious cofounder D. Scott Phoenix: "Artificial intelligence is the next major fundamental technology that will empower the world." Vicarious doesn't plan to have a product out next year. By the time Vicarious launches its first full product, it could be 2031. And that far-distant timeline doesn't seem to be putting off investors: already 70m has been put into the company from tech luminaries including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, despite the fact the company isn't registered as a for-profit. Taking 15 or 20 years to launch a product proper sounds an eternity in a Silicon Valley where fortunes rise and fall in the three months between quarterly results, but Vicarious isn't just working on any old product.

A computer program has beaten a master Go player 3-0 in a best-of-five competition, in what is seen as a landmark moment for artificial intelligence. Google's AlphaGo program was playing against Lee Se-dol in Seoul, in South Korea. Lee Se-dol is one of the game's greatest modern players Mr Lee had been confident he would win before the competition started. The Chinese board game is considered to be a much more complex challenge for a computer than chess. "AlphaGo played consistently from beginning to the end while Lee, as he is only human, showed some mental vulnerability," one of Lee's former coaches, Kwon Kap-Yong, told the AFP news agency.

The fresh-looking visuals incorporate Snapchat content and rely heavily on tech journalism darling Ashlee Vance, author of the best-selling Elon Musk bio.

We hear an awful lot about how artificial intelligence can be used to solve hard statistical challenges – but we hear much less about how it could solve emotional problems. But this field already has a name, affective computing, and one of its leading firms today is Affectiva. Don't miss our biggest TNW Conference yet! The startup is a spinout of MIT's Media Lab, where researchers were working on ways to create new technologies that would enhance emotional communication and, yes, it already started offering'Emotion As A Service' late last year. The company has what is thought to be the world's largest database of emotions, gathered using facial recognition technology to analyze over 3.8 million faces from 75 countries and collating over 40 billion different data points.

The risk of cyberattacks is one of the most dangerous threats facing businesses today. And while new versions of attacks are constantly being born, teams of analysts are rushing to keep up with the latest risks. While many detection systems rely primarily on machine learning for catching attackers, a new AI system at PatternEx depends on human analysts as a vital part of their system of supervised machine learning. Humans 2.0: How the robot revolution is going to change how we see, feel, and talk Robots aren't going to replace us, but by working hand in hand with us they will redefine what it means to be human. PatternEx's AI system is the first "virtual" security analyst team, and can predict, detect, and stop attackers in real time.

As the tweets below show, Tay isn't afraid to crack some jokes and use millennial slang. She was created by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams, using a mix of public data, artificial intelligence and eccentric staff contributions. "Public data that's been anonymized is Tay's primary data source," Microsoft explains on the Tay website. "That data has been modeled, cleaned and filtered by the team developing Tay." A word of warning: Microsoft says Tay will use your conversations to "search on your behalf" and "create a simple profile" in order to personalize her responses.

I'd had a handful of clumsy threesomes in college, but nothing compared to the wall-to-wall sex fest I had in mind. My encounters with role-playing games were similarly limited. I'd been party to a couple of rounds of D&D in high school because the dungeon master smoked us out and bought us beer, but 15-plus years later I couldn't even begin to tell you what to do with a 12-sided die. So when I heard about the Red Light Center, "the world's only FREE Massively Multiplayer, Adult Virtual World," I was cautiously optimistic. I'd come across Red Light Center during my "first-hand quest for the future of sex."

Minecraft has had its share of real-world crossovers, but nothing quite like this. Norway's annual The Gathering tech conference is hosting a live concert both in real life and in Minecraft tonight at 9PM local time (4PM Eastern), with volunteers mimicking the artists in Minecraft as they parade around the stage. And this isn't a small production, either -- AlunaGeorge, Broiler and Lemaitre are on deck, so you should be in for a good time whether you're looking at the real artists or their blocky avatars.