Google's AI robot has told us the meaning of life

Google has created a new, super-intelligent robot -- and it has provided answers to some of the questions that have troubled humans for centuries. Conversations are one of the most important and difficult tasks that artificial intelligence has to undertake. As such, the robots have tended to work only in either very restricted situations -- such as customer support when booking an airline ticket -- or by giving canned replies in response to specific questions. But Google hopes that its new system for robots could overcome some of those problems with existing chatting artificial intelligence, partly by making it able to learn through interacting with humans rather than being fed pre-written lines, though it has run into some problems during testing. The researchers began by asking fairly straightforward questions about technical support.