Alec was looking at one of the most powerful minds in history. A crystal brain frozen in mid-explosion, as if someone had pressed a pause button. We wanted a mind better than ours. The young researcher sighed and drummed his slender fingers on the transparent compu-table. He stared through the tinted window into the sterile supercooled room that housed its mighty prisoner.

Automated story plot generation is the task of generating a coherent sequence of plot events. Causal relations between plot events are believed to increase the perception of story and plot coherence. In this work, we introduce the concept of soft causal relations as causal relations inferred from commonsense reasoning. We demonstrate C2PO, an approach to narrative generation that operationalizes this concept through Causal, Commonsense Plot Ordering. Using human-participant protocols, we evaluate our system against baseline systems with different commonsense reasoning reasoning and inductive biases to determine the role of soft causal relations in perceived story quality. Through these studies we also probe the interplay of how changes in commonsense norms across storytelling genres affect perceptions of story quality.

Tesla has restored the Autopilot driver assistance features it remotely disabled on a used Model S, just days after Jalopnik published a story about the customer's ordeal. The owner, who Jalopnik simply referred to as Alec, confirmed to The Verge that the features are back after The Next Web spotted new Tesla Motors Club forum posts he wrote earlier this week. Alec said he was contacted by a Tesla customer experience rep who "apologized for my troubles, told me that Tesla has restored all missed options" and "cited a miscommunication" as the reason why the company pulled the Autopilot features in the first place. Alec had purchased the used 2017 Model S in December from a third-party dealer that acquired the car from Tesla at auction in November. The original owner had equipped the car with the (now-retired) "Enhanced Autopilot" version of Tesla's driver assistance package and the company's "Full Self-Driving" package, which promises increased autonomy over the years.

A Facebook tool that helps students be more productive and keep track of assignments developed by a Victoria teen has gone viral in an unexpected place. Alec Jones, 14, says his chatbot, Christopher Bot, that helps students stay on top of their homework has garnered more than 3,000 subscribers, with many of them based in Thailand. Chatbots are automated software programs, which Alec compares to iPhone's Siri, that respond to users in a conversational manner. The bot that he developed works through Facebook's Messenger platform. For students who forget to write down their assignments or deadlines when they are handed out or struggle to keep track of it all, Christopher Bot is designed to do the remembering for them.

Yet despite the promise of a revolution in how we interact with services and companies online, progress has been utterly miserable - the vast majority of chatbots are gimmicky, pointless or just flat out broken. But this week I was given great cause for optimism, in the form of Alec Jones, a 14-year-old from Victoria, Canada. For the past six months, Alec been working on Christopher Bot, a chatbot that helps students keep track of homework they've been given over the course of a week. To set things up, a student shares his or her schedule with Christopher Bot, and from then on it will send a quick message at the end of each lesson asking if any homework had been set. "Do you have homework for maths?" it asked 30-year-old me pretending to be a child for the sake of this piece. "Your teacher needs to chill out on the homework," came the auto-response, adding, "what homework do you have?"