Something incredible is happening in AI right now, and it's not entirely to the good. Everybody is talking about systems like chatGPT (OpenAI), Dall-E 2, and Lensa that generate text and images that look remarkably human-like, with astonishingly little effort. These systems can be incredibly fun to play with. Take this example, generated by chatGPT by Henry Minsky (son of Marvin Minsky, one of AI's founders), who asked chatGPT to "Describe losing your sock in the dryer in the style of the declaration of independence": When in the course of household events, it becomes necessary for one to dissolve the bonds that have connected a sock to its mate, and to assume among the powers of the laundry room, the separate and equal station to which the laws of physics and of household maintenance entitle it, a decent respect to the opinions of socks requires that it should declare the causes which impel it to go missing. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all socks are created equal, and are endowed by their manufacturer with certain unalienable rights….

Set in undetermined future society where robotics are a major part of everyday life, from performing household chores to construction and more, Runaway follows Officer Jack Ramsay (Tom Selleck), head of the so-called'Runaway Squad'. His hi-tech unit deals with out of control robots, intervening where humans may be endangered by the machines' malfunctions. When Ramsay discovers a plot by criminal genius Luther (Gene Simmons) to sell advanced microchips and cutting edge weaponry to the highest bidder, he finds himself taking on not only Luther, but also the dangerous killer's deadly robotic creations. Written and directed by the late Michael Crichton, Runaway continues the theme of the dangers of technology affecting the lives of humans that had been previously visited in his previous works Westworld and Looker. Reviewing Runaway now, thirty years after it's original release, is a real eye opener to Crichton's foresight.

Banks are turning to machine learning and other advanced technological protocols to protect consumers in the escalating fraud arms race, as legacy systems creak under the digital burden - market participants and commentators say. "As banking has entered the online and mobile channels, so has fraud and the complexity of today's digital attacks increased. Financial institutions now have a whole host of additional access points and complex channels to defend," according to Mark Crichton, senior director, security product management at OneSpan, the mobile security company. Between $25m and $40m is estimated to be lost to card not present fraud (CNP) globally, according to Accenture. CNP - or ecommerce fraud - is increasing hand in hand with the wider availability of sensitive customer data following a string of data breaches, according to UK Finance.

In the original film "Westworld" (1973), written and directed by an up-and-coming novelist named Michael Crichton, the Delos corporation operates a kind of Disney World for depraved adults, a series of amusement parks where they can interact with uncannily lifelike robots in various environments. The parks include Medievalworld and Romanworld, but the bulk of the movie's action takes place in Westworld, where visitors are invited to shoot at android attractions like the Gunslinger (Yul Brenner) without fear of retaliation. All that changes when a technical glitch spreads through the parks like a virus, and suddenly the hosts are attacking the guests, not the other way around. Of the many differences between Crichton's "Westworld" and the HBO version, which started its second season last Sunday, the most telling is the hands. For all their technical brilliance, the engineers in Crichton's film could never get the hands right: If visitors needed to tell who is and isn't a robot, they could look at the conspicuous silicon rings around the joints and know they weren't about to shoot (or otherwise violate) a human being.

Techies and gamers should pay attention to HBO's Westworld, which debuts on Sunday as a major TV show that delves into human artificial intelligence. The sci-fi series explores the morality of creating human-like artificial intelligent beings, how we should treat them, and what the difference is between humans and machines. In a press briefing, I talked with the creators of the show, and during that conversation, video games, virtual reality, and real-world technology came up a lot. The show is a remake of Michael Crichton's sci-fi film of 1973, where rich guests can take a vacation in the almost-real theme park of Westworld, which is full of androids who are instructed not to harm the human guests. The human guests can do anything they want, with no consequences, according to the corporation that runs the technological paradise.

My day job, in lieu of teaching creative writing like a normal person, is writing scripts for blockbuster video games. Last summer, while I watched a play-through of the then-unreleased Gears of War 4, for which I was the lead writer, something odd happened. The game's story called for a massive plane crash, out of which a single robot, operatically aflame, was intended to stride toward the player. Within the game's fiction, robots have hitherto opposed the player, but we wanted this particular burning robot to pose no immediate threat. The game programmers had thus switched off the hostility driven by the robot's artificial intelligence, allowing the player to walk past the hapless robot or shoot it. Most of us on the development team, I think, hoped our game's future players wouldn't shoot. Just ahead of the encounter we placed what is referred to, in game design, as a frontgate--a kind of contrived environmental blockage intended to prevent players from rushing too far ahead, which can mess up loading times.

Imagine a world where you can experience your wildest dreams, interact with artificially intelligent characters and do whatever you want without consequences. While this may be the plot of the hit HBO series "Westworld," based on Michael Crichton's book of the same name, the future of artificial intelligence (AI) we see on our screens may come sooner than we think. According to VentureBeat, Crichton's story follows wealthy guests who holiday in the "almost-real theme park of Westworld, which is full of androids who are instructed not to harm the human guests." The guests, however, can do anything they want, without consequences. When Crichton's "Westworld" was released in 1973, the ideas in it were considered science fiction, but while the use of technology in the show is at a level that's unfeasible today, it's no longer unimaginable.

JPL and National Cancer Institute Renew Big Data Partnership Every day, NASA spacecraft beam down hundreds of petabytes of data, all of which has to be codified, stored and distributed to scientists across the globe. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is helping to "read" this data as well, highlighting similarities between datasets that scientists might miss. For the past 15 years, the big data techniques pioneered by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have been revolutionizing biomedical research. On Sept. 6, 2016, JPL and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, renewed a research partnership through 2021, extending the development of data science that originated in space exploration and is now supporting new cancer discoveries. The NCI-supported Early Detection Research Network (EDRN) is a consortium of biomedical investigators who share anonymized data on cancer biomarkers, chemical or genetic signatures related to specific cancers.

In the history of cinema, few images are as iconic as Yul Brynner's gunslinger, relentlessly pursing his quarry: Westworld theme-park guest Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin), the sole survivor of a software glitch that turned the robots populating its imaginary worlds into killers. "It was terrifying, terrifying, but so much of it has become kind of iconic," says producer Jonathan Nolan, who with co-producer (and wife) Lisa Joy, is steering the HBO television reboot of the film. "Yul Brynner, this unstoppable creation, wearing the same wardrobe from The Magnificent Seven, is iconic." Though the film, just 88 minutes long and written and directed by Michael Crichton, seems to wholly belong to the 1970s in tone and style, its themes made a reboot unusually relevant, Nolan says. "The world has obviously changed in the decades since the original film, but changed only in ways that make the original premise that much more interesting," he says.

Advanced cancer research is calling on techniques used by NASA scientists who analyze satellite imagery to find commonalities among stars, planets and galaxies in space. Scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) use complex machine learning algorithms to identify similarities among galaxies that may otherwise be overlooked, NASA officials said in a statement. Using similar techniques, medical professionals are able to analyze a lung sample for common cancer biomarkers. However, analyzing a biopsy specimen for biomarkers is not the only way in which JPL's complex machine learning algorithms can be used in the medical field. Cancer researchers can also use the space exploration tools to identify common chemical or genetic signatures related to specific cancers, which could revolutionize strategies for early cancer detection.