Dropbox announced two new products today that (not quite shockingly) shift the company's focus to AI. Dropbox AI scans your documents, providing summaries and answers, while the more ambitious Dropbox Dash serves as a unified search bar for your life. Dropbox AI is the simpler of the two new offerings. It applies artificial intelligence to file previews, offering summaries and a natural language Q&A about your docs. "With the click of a button, you can summarize your content, like contracts and meeting recordings, into a concise explanation," the company explained. Or, ask Dropbox AI questions about the content of a specific file, and it can answer.

Creating reasonable AI for sidekicks in games has proven to be a difficult challenge synthetizing player modelling and cooperative planning, both being problems hard by themselves. In this paper, we experiment with designing around these problems: we propose a cooperative puzzle-platformer game that was designed to look similarly to the mainstream of the genre, but to allow for an easy implementation of a quality sidekick AI, letting us test player reactions to the AI. The game was designed so that it is easy for the AI to find optimal solutions while the problem is relatively hard for a human player. We gathered survey responses from players who played the game online (N 28). While the AI sidekick was reported as likeable and helpful, players still reported greater enjoyment of the game when they were allowed to control the sidekick themselves. These findings indicate that the AI itself is not the only obstacle to truly enjoyable gameplay with an AI sidekick.

When you are two years old, your mother knows more about you than you know yourself. As you get older, you begin to understand things about your mind that even she doesn't know. But then, says Yuval Noah Harari, another competitor joins the race: "You have this corporation or government running after you, and they are way past your mother, and they are at your back." Amazon will soon know when you need lightbulbs right before they burn out. YouTube knows how to keep you starting at the screen long past when it's in your interest to stop. An advertiser in the future might know your sexual preferences before they are clear to you. Recently, I spoke with Harari, the author of three best-selling books, and Tristan Harris, who runs the Center for Humane Technology and who has played a substantial role in making "Time Well Spent" perhaps the most-debated phrase in Silicon Valley in 2018. They are two of the smartest people in the world of tech, and each spoke eloquently about self-knowledge and how humans can make themselves harder to hack. As Harari said, "We are now facing not just a technological crisis but a philosophical crisis." Please read or watch the entire thing. This transcript has been edited for clarity. Nicholas Thompson: Tristan, tell me a little bit about what you do and then Yuval, you tell me too. Tristan Harris: I am a director of the Center for Humane Technology where we focus on re-aligning technology with a clear-eyed model of human nature. And I was before that a design ethicist at Google where I studied the ethics of human persuasion. Yuval Noah Harari: I'm a historian and I try to understand where humanity is coming from and where we are heading. NT: Let's start by hearing about how you guys met because I know that goes back a while. When did the two of you first meet? YNH: Funnily enough, on an expedition to Antarctica, we were invited by the Chilean government to the Congress of the Future to talk about the future of humankind and one part of the Congress was an expedition to the Chilean base in Antarctica to see global warming with our own eyes. And I think we particularly connected with Michael Sandel, who is a really amazing philosopher of moral philosophy. I would have loved to see the whole thing. You write about different things, you talk about different things but there are a lot of similarities. And one of the key themes is the notion that our minds don't work the way that we sometimes think they do. We don't have as much agency over our minds as perhaps we believed until now.

Scientists are working on a kickass new twist to the classic buddy cop movie genre. Get this: cyberterrorist Marcus Hurricane is going to walk free unless police detective Rick Danger can place him at the scene of the crime. But all he has to go on are some grainy security camera images, and he can't quite make out Hurricane's signature badass face scars. Enter: detective Danger's trusty AI cyborg sidekick, Sparky. Together, they have what it takes to save the day. But researchers did recently determine that, when it comes to difficult facial recognition tasks, a trained professional teamed up with an AI sidekick is better than a team of two human pros –or even an AI algorithm on its own.

Creating reasonable AI for sidekicks in games has proven to be a difficult challenge synthetizing player modelling and cooperative planning, both being problems hard by themselves. In this paper, we experiment with designing around these problems: we propose a cooperative puzzle-platformer game that was designed to look similarly to the mainstream of the genre, but to allow for an easy implementation of a quality sidekick AI, letting us test player reactions to the AI. The game was designed so that it is easy for the AI to find optimal solutions while the problem is relatively hard for a human player. We gathered survey responses from players who played the game online (N=28). While the AI sidekick was reported as likeable and helpful, players still reported greater enjoyment of the game when they were allowed to control the sidekick themselves. These findings indicate that the AI itself is not the only obstacle to truly enjoyable gameplay with an AI sidekick.