House of Cards writer Beau Willimon's new play East Is South deals with the ethics and advancement of AI. But despite the transformative subject matter, Ellen McDougall's production has as much propulsion as a car in reverse. Skins actor Kaya Scodelario plays Lena, a former Mennonite and gifted coder, who is wrestling with the expanding consciousness of Logos, the software her company has developed. We meet her as she is preparing to be questioned by the workplace bigwigs who watch her from the upper level of Alex Eales's two-tiered sciene-inspired set as if she is a caged animal. Lena and her lover, Sasha (Luke Treadaway) are being investigated after a security breach.

That's because machine-learning algorithms need both brain signals and information about what they correspond to, paired in perfect synchrony, to learn what the signals mean. When studying inner experience, all scientists have to go on is what people say is going on inside their head, and that can be reliable. "It's not like it's directly measuring as a ground truth what people experienced," says Raphaël Millière, a lecturer in philosophy at Macquarie University in Australia. Tying brain activity to subjective experience requires facing up to the slipperiness and inexactitude of language, particularly when deployed to capture the richness of one's inner life. In order to meet that demanding brief, scientists like Millière are marrying contemporary artificial intelligence with centuries-old techniques, from philosophical interview strategies to ancient meditation practices.

Now, a few researchers are trying a new approach: harnessing artificial intelligence to zero in on the winning conditions. Specifically, several groups have started using machine-learning tools that can identify patterns in data sets too huge and messy for the human brain to comprehend. The hope is that these tools will help researchers achieve in years what would otherwise take decades. By pointing the way to the fastest and sturdiest processes for generating complexity, they could help us devise a universal theory of the origins of life--one that applies not just on Earth but on any other world. It's early days--but there have already been some significant advances.

What do our creations think of us? Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 is a language model released by OpenAI in 2020 that uses deep learning to produce text that seems like it could have been written by a human. Taken individually, the AI's lines don't smack much of poetry or strictly cohere, but in aggregate, they gesture at something more. What would it produce if asked to meditate on the human soul and to produce spiritual poetry like ours? What does it think of our religious beliefs?

He stressed the need to utilize the advanced technology being created, including machine learning and the capabilities of artificial intelligence.

By now, you've already heard how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can increase revenue and boost efficiency for your business. Analyzing patterns, detecting fraud, improving customer relationships, optimizing supply chains, automating processes--there's almost no end to the ways AI and ML can empower you to make faster, more informed decisions. The FlexPod AI converged architecture stands ready to help you get started quickly and safely. To find out how, take a few moments to explore it up close. Whether you're a data engineer, vice president of IT, or AI solution architect, FlexPod AI is designed to help handle and prepare all kinds of data.

I can never quite work out how how I feel about robots. For every Terminator in Terminator, there's a Terminator in Terminator 2. You know what I mean? So, when I was offered the opportunity to interview the famous Sophia robot at the Bright Day tech festival in Haarlem, I had to do it. I needed to know for sure whether robots are a force for good or evil. This meant one thing: I had to ask Sophia humanity's biggest questions – something you can watch in the video above.

Artificial intelligence is all around us. As I shared in Content Creation Robots Are Here, billions of AI-created pieces of content are published yearly. What does this mean for humans who create content? Are you in danger of losing a job? Despite the growth in artificial intelligence capabilities, the human content writer is needed more than ever.

One of the first things Genevieve Bell did after bringing home an Amazon Echo was ask the smart speaker to set a timer. After the Echo replied in its soft, reassuring female voice, Bell told the device "thank you." "When was the last time you said'thank you' to Google search?" asked Bell, Intel's longtime cultural anthropologist and corporate strategist. Bell's experience points to both the promise and the peril of Google's new effort to create its own digital butler, simply dubbed "Google assistant," which it hopes will become capable of natural, two-way conversation with people. Several experts in conversational software said Google could make itself an even more intimate part of users' lives by offering this kind of technology.