Welcome to the future where robots rule the world and humans are relegated to the sidelines. Sounds like a science fiction movie? The rapid advancement of AI technology has sparked a heated debate about the potential consequences of AI and its impact on the future of humanity. But one thing is sure. AI is not just a futuristic fantasy; it's happening right now.

If artificial intelligences controlled nuclear weapons, all of us could be dead. In 1983, Soviet Air Defense Forces Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was monitoring nuclear early warning systems, when the computer concluded with the highest confidence that the United States had launched a nuclear war. But Petrov was doubtful: The computer estimated only a handful of nuclear weapons were incoming, when such a surprise attack would more plausibly entail an overwhelming first strike. He also didn't trust the new launch detection system, and the radar system didn't have corroborative evidence. Petrov decided the message was a false positive and did nothing. The computer was wrong; Petrov was right.

AI is exponentially growing, making it smarter and smarter each day. The prediction algorithm deployed by Facebook to track you and serve you with suitable ads (Ad optimization) works at a staggering 98% accuracy. In other words, you can say that this AI software knows you better than your own family members! We have DeepFace(again by Facebook), which identifies human faces with 97.25% accuracy without factoring in lighting conditions and angle. What do we get out of AI? AI has been a pioneer for identification, space research, transportation, and whatnot.

Professor Bostrom spoke about AI and its safety on the sidelines of Russia's main event in the field of technological entrepreneurship - the annual Open Innovations forum - held by Skolkovo's Innovation Center. Sputnik: In what area can we expect to see "unicorns" in the future? Nick Bostrom: They can crop up in any part of the economy really, as long as the sector has a certain size that could bring new innovations and new ideas that would be successful enough to become worth a billion. Nick Bostrom: I think the highly salient areas which are sort of big ambitions tech things on the Internet. But a lot of other parts of the economy that also are quite large and have less of a public profile.

Louisiana Tech Research Institute researcher Adam Lowther and Air Force Institute of Technology associate dean Curtis McGiffin say their country needs a "dead hand" on the trigger to the world's largest arsenal of weapons. They argue that giving AI control over the weapons available at America's disposal would drastically reduce the response time needed for a retaliatory strike, something the pair say might be necessary as missiles become faster and harder to detect. Even if there was nobody left alive to order a nuclear strike AI could launch the weapons, guaranteeing mutually assured destruction and eliminating the possibility that your enemies could wipe you out quickly enough to prevent retaliation. It's certainly an idea, even if it sounds dangerously like the prologue of a film set in a future where the human race has been all but wiped out and replaced by robots. With new technologies come new considerations, there's technically nothing wrong with throwing out ideas.

In this paper, law professor Lynn Lopucki ponders the question: What happens if you turn over control of a corporate entity to an AI? Odds are high you'd see them emerge first in criminal enterprises, as ways of setting up entities that engage in nefarious activities but cannot be meaningfully punished (in human terms, anyway), even if they're caught, he argues. Given their corporate personhood in the US, they'd enjoy the rights to own property, to enter into contracts, to legal counsel, to free speech, and to buy politicians -- so they could wreak a lot of havoc. The prospect of AI running firms and exploiting legal loopholes has been explored in cyberpunk sci-fi, so it's mesmerizing to watch the world of real-world law start to grapple with this. It's coming on the tails of various thinkers pointing out that Silicon Valley's fears of killer AI are predicated on the idea that AIs would act in precisely the way today's corporations do: i.e. that they'd be remorselessly devoted to their self-interest, immortal and immoral, and regard humans as mere gut-flora -- to use Cory's useful metaphor -- towards pursuance of their continued existence. Or to put it another way, corporations already evince much of the terrifying behavior LoPucki predicts we'll see from algorithmic entities; it's not clear that any world government is willing to bring to justice any of the humans putatively in control of today's crimedoing firms, so even the moral immunity you'd see in AIs is basically already in place.

The hand of humanoid robot AILA (artificial intelligence lightweight android) operates a switchboard during a demonstration by the German research centre for artificial intelligence at the CeBit computer fair in Hanover March, 5, 2013. It is easy to confuse the current geopolitical situation with that of the 1980s. The US and Russia each accuse the other of interfering in domestic affairs. Russia has annexed territory over US objections, raising concerns about military conflict. As during the Cold War after World War II, nations are developing and building weapons based on advanced technology. During the Cold War, the weapon of choice was nuclear missiles; today it's software, whether its used for attacking computer systems or targets in the real world.

You might have noticed lot of excitement around AI at the moment, with the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon all vying to be the loudest voice promoting the newest buzzword. In some cases it is even being heralded as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. With AI-powered Go and chess champions, it seems like'the singularity' is fast approaching. Even Apple's recent WWDC keynotes saw software chief Craig Federighi casually announce new Core ML APIs aimed at attracting AI-conscious coders, APIs that will increase the use of things like facial recognition and semantic text cognition in future Apple products. To be clear though, AI isn't quite yet the stuff of science fiction - although SkyNet may actually exist, what we have today doesn't resemble the Terminators, or even 2001: A Space Odyssey's Hal, luckily for us all.

Anyone who's ever landed in the passenger seat with someone learning to drive will admit to being at least slightly nervous. Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI) controls, you may never again have to worry if Jr. makes a mistake behind the wheel. Just make sure your car has enough miles under its belt to know how to avoid a wreck. That's right, artificial intelligence is coming to consumer vehicles, and it could happen as soon as five years from now. While the media has focused primarily on the way this new technology allows for potentially self-driving cars, there are a number of other features and perks that come along with it.

As usual, our goal is to quickly learn a policy which receives a high reward per episode. We can apply a traditional RL algorithm to the semi-supervised setting by simply ignoring all of the unlabelled episodes. This will generally result in very slow learning. The interesting challenge is to learn efficiently from the unlabelled episodes. I think that semi-supervised RL is a valuable ingredient for AI control, as well as an interesting research problem in reinforcement learning.