One of the purposes of the Tony Little Centre for Innovation and Research in Learning (CIRL) at Eton is to make sure that the school is keeping abreast of developments and innovations in education. Innovation typically seeds out of sight to meet a niche need; if it later finds a mainstream application, it is likely to be well-formed and possibly either a benefit or a potential threat. To future-proof our current success we need to be paying attention to the most significant innovations and to make sure that we see change coming. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one such innovation. AI is already impacting on the kinds of careers many Etonians go into, including finance, medicine, law and the military.

Artificial intelligence is becoming a central part of people's lives, even if they don't realize it. So many everyday functions have an artificial intelligence component – from auto-correct on text messages to map routes, from home loan approvals to Netflix suggestions. But while that may sound innovative, questions of "fairness" have arisen. For example, when it comes to home mortgages, white males tend to be approved more often and get lower interest rates, compared with others. But is it fair for that group to get an advantage over others?

Well, computer scientists from the University of British Columbia and National University of Singapore just did that with a bipedal computer model (read: essentially a pair of animated legs) -- only instead of a cute cartoon rabbit, the teacher is a deep reinforcement learning artificial intelligence algorithm. Google's DeepMind, for example, has used reinforcement learning to teach an AI to play classic video games by working out how to achieve high scores. It's like watching your kid grow up -- except that, you know, in this case, your kid is a pair of disembodied AI legs powered by Skynet! A paper describing the work, titled "DeepLoco: Dynamic Locomotion Skills Using Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning" was published in the journal Transactions on Graphics.

Each year, the artificial intelligence community convenes to administer the famous -- and famously controversial -- Turing test, pitting sophisticated software programs against humans to determine if a computer can "think." The machine that most often fools the judges wins the Most Human Computer Award. But there is also a prize, strange and intriguing, for the "Most Human Human." Brian Christian, a young poet with degrees in computer science and philosophy, was chosen to participate in a recent competition. This playful, profound book is not only a testament to his efforts to be deemed more human than a computer, but also a rollicking exploration of what it means to be human in the first place.