While the purpose of the study was not to prove that AI systems are capable of replacing humans in creative roles, it raises philosophical questions about the characteristics that are unique to humans, says Simone Grassini, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Bergen, Norway, who co-led the research. "We've shown that in the past few years, technology has taken a very big leap forward when we talk about imitating human behavior," he says. "These models are continuously evolving." Proving that machines can perform well in tasks designed for measuring creativity in humans doesn't demonstrate that they're capable of anything approaching original thought, says Ryan Burnell, a senior research associate at the Alan Turing Institute, who was not involved with the research. The chatbots that were tested are "black boxes," meaning that we don't know exactly what data they were trained on, or how they generate their responses, he says.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that fears that "AI will kill us" are exagerated, being fears about something that "literally ceases to exist the moment anyone pulls the plug off the computers it runs on. AI itself cannot "kill" anything more real than avatars in some simulation. AI is the most vulnerable, helpless thing ever." By pure chance, yesterday I found a post discussing exactly "why we can't just unplug it: by the time we discover it is a superintelligence it will have spread itself across many computers and built deep and hard defenses for these. That could happen for example by manipulating humans into thinking they are building defenses for a completely different reason."

Join our XPotential Community, future proof yourself with courses from XPotential University, read about exponential tech and trends, connect, watch a keynote, or browse my blog. I recently wrote about a researcher who built a virtual computer in a virtual world which in itself would create a weird infinitely looping paradox and which could be possible of continuous self improvement. And now in a similar move it turns an Artificial Intelligence (AI) has built a computer inside itself that can run code, such as another AI or … whatever. And, since this technology or trend doesn't have a name yet I've decided to call it Meta Artificial Intelligence (MAI), to go along with the Meta Computing trend, which also didn't have a name. And if you can think of a better name then I'm all ears … perhaps Multi-Dimensional AI? Huh?

Even with technology, sometimes we believe in fairy tales. A fairy tale is a story with a "fantastic and magical setting or magical influences within a story." I hadn't thought much about fairy tales recently, until I began reviewing the number of online case studies about artificial intelligence (AI) in companies. In most of these case studies, the bottom line was that an AI solution had been successfully implemented. However, when I reviewed the stories for business outcomes or results, the results weren't there.

An algorithm has confirmed the existence of 50 new planets in a world-first for machine learning in astronomy. Scientists from Warwick University made the discovery by analyzing data collected by space telescopes, such as NASA's Kepler and TESS. This passage produces a distinctive dip in light emerging from the star. However, this effect can also be caused by a binary star system, interference from other objects, or problems with the camera. The new system was designed to separate these false positives from observations of real planets.

Can you tell what a completely random person is like just by staring at a selfie? Selfies can't automatically give away personality traits to the human eye. This is where AI has just gotten more fascinating or downright scarier, depending on how you see it. Artificial neural networks are now able to figure out what your next potential date (or anyone else) could be like just by being creepy. AI developed by a team of Russian scientists can predict traits like agreeableness, neuroticism, openness and extraversion just by scanning photos. It could be revolutionary for finding optimal matches not just for dating, but also customer service and online tutoring, among other things.

In the time it takes you to read this article, one person in the US will die from an infection that antibiotics can no longer treat effectively. And over the course of this year, 700,000 people around the world will die from drug-resistant infections. That annual death toll could rise to 10 million by 2050, a major UN report recently warned, if we don't make a radical change. For the first time, AI researchers have figured out how to identify brand-new types of antibiotics by training a neural network to predict which molecules will have bacteria-killing properties. They've just published their findings in the journal Cell.

The first systematic review and meta-analysis of its kind finds that artificial intelligence (AI) is just as good at diagnosing a disease based on a medical image as healthcare professionals. However, more high quality studies are necessary. A new article examines the existing evidence in an attempt to determine whether AI can diagnose illnesses as effectively as healthcare professionals. To the authors' knowledge -- that is, a vast team of researchers led by Professor Alastair Denniston from the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust in the United Kingdom -- this is the first systematic review that compares AI performance with medical professionals for all diseases. Prof. Denniston and team searched several medical databases for all studies published between 1st of January 2012 and 6th of June 2019.

Computers have guided us to the moon and back but can't help us with us with the biggest decisions we face today. Should Donald Trump be impeached? Should Britain leave the EU? Should Australia stop exporting fossil fuels? Questions like these do not have yes or no answers, however tempting it is to think otherwise.

The version of Project Debater used in the live debates included the seeds of the latest system, such as the capability to search hundreds of millions of new articles. But in the months since, the team has extensively tweaked the neural networks it uses, improving the quality of the evidence the system can unearth. One important addition is BERT, a neural network Google built for natural-language processing, which can answer queries. The work will be presented at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference in New York next month.