In high stakes competitive chess, there's a gaming style called "Freestyle" which is just as "ditch-the-rulebook" as it sounds. The best players are called "centaurs" and although these particular centaurs aren't half-human/half-horse, their makeup runs along the same logic. Centaurs are great chess players who use AI to make themselves better. Instead, they're sort of riding on top of AI (kind of like the human half of the centaur body, get it?) They use artificial intelligence to help guide their moves.

January is a special month in AI history. Because in both the novel and movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, January 12 is when the HAL 9000 sentient computer -- (spoiler alert!) the story's antagonistic artificial intelligence -- goes live. Depending on whether you date HAL to its "birth" in the film, the novel, or when those media originated, HAL is anywhere between 22 years to 51 years old now (For trivia buffs, of which I'm one: The book and film were released in 1968, making HAL's conception over 50 years ago; if you go by the dates given in the film or the book, respectively, HAL is either 27 or 22 years old). HAL is then placed aboard the Discovery One spacecraft to participate in a journey of, well, discovery to the planet Jupiter. Of course, HAL decides pretty quickly that the people on the mission are a significant roadblock to completing the mission, decides the ship and voyage would be better served without all those pesky humans running around… and tries to kill everyone onboard.

Way back in 1942, futurists like Isaac Asimov were already giving thought to the risks of emerging technologies, especially autonomous ones. It was during that year that Asimov wrote a short story entitled "Runaround" in which he unveiled the three laws of robotics. The key theme for these laws was that a robot could not through action or inaction allow harm to come to humans. Over the years both philosophers and writers have examined these laws in myriad ways showing the loopholes in the language and the challenges that can arise in edge cases. Regardless, the principles seem like the sort of thing we'd want if robots walked among us.

So, for example, if you were trying to predict the weather and the way you were doing that is you were taking all sorts of inputs of barometric pressure and wind speed, and you were trying to look at where the systems are a hundred miles away, and said, you were using that type of data to predict what was going to happen in an hour or three hours. Then, in order to do that you have to have good data that says that you agree on what it is that happens. If something as amorphous as the weather … For some people accuracy means, "How many inches of snow do we get?" For other people it means, "Did we get precipitation at all?" Because predicting snow versus rain is really difficult when it's 32 degrees out.

Evolution as understood by Charles Darwin was supposed to happen very slowly and gradually. That's why he, and many other scientists, were puzzled by an event that happened about 540 million years ago, known as the Cambrian Explosion. During that period, life as it was known went in overdrive mode, and a world that was mostly comprised by simple life forms, suddenly – in geological scale – became extremely diversified, with most major animal phyla appearing in a span of 25 million years, to then slow down to its normal pace. There are many theories trying to explain it, like the increase in oxygen levels, or the onset of new genetic mechanisms drastically affecting embryo development. A possible explanation was made popular in 2003 by then Oxford professor Andrew Parker, who published the book "In the blink of an eye: how vision sparked the big bang of evolution".