Call it the Skynet hypothesis, Artificial General Intelligence, or the advent of the Singularity -- for years, AI experts and non-experts alike have fretted (and, for a small group, celebrated) the idea that artificial intelligence may one day become smarter than humans. According to the theory, advances in AI -- specifically of the machine learning type that's able to take on new information and rewrite its code accordingly -- will eventually catch up with the wetware of the biological brain. In this interpretation of events, every AI advance from Jeopardy-winning IBM machines to the massive AI language model GPT-3 is taking humanity one step closer to an existential threat. Except that it will never happen. Co-authors University at Buffalo philosophy professor Barry Smith and Jobst Landgrebe, founder of German AI company Cognotekt argue that human intelligence won't be overtaken by "an immortal dictator" any time soon -- or ever.

Whatever I called it, it was going to be big. It was the pitch for my new startup, a company that promised to deliver one of the world's most popular resources in the most high-tech way imaginable: an on-demand drone delivery service for bottled water. In my mind I was already picking out my Gulfstream private jet, bumping fists with Apple's Tim Cook, and staging hostile takeovers of Twitter. I just needed to convince a panel of venture capitalists that I (and they) were onto a good thing. There were three VCs in total.

You look at an image of a black circle on a grid of circular dots. It resembles a hole burned into a piece of white mesh material, although it's actually a flat, stationary image on a screen or piece of paper. But your brain doesn't comprehend it like that. Responding to the verisimilitude of the effect, the body starts to unconsciously react: the eye's pupils dilate to let more light in, just as they would adjust if you were about to be plunged into darkness to ensure the best possible vision. The effect in question was created by Akiyoshi Kitaoka, a psychologist at Ritsumeikan University in Kobe, Japan.

Microsoft Teams will soon receive several AI and machine learning updates to improve its video and audio experience.

Modern tech-savvy consumers are opting for financial service providers that can help them better understand their financial position and manage it accordingly across any platform, any time. There is a new breed of agile, tech-driven start-ups that are fast changing the fintech landscape. Consumers expect a digital-first customer experience and businesses will have to adapt to and thrive in this changing environment. Tech is transforming the market and meeting the growing digital demand. Waiting to innovate is no longer an option for traditional banks and other financial institutions, they need to act quickly to remain competitive.

That implies, 2021 should spike in advanced patterns with developments by plan that could additionally decide customer online conduct. Businesses employ innovative analytics to quantify how clients interact with a business site, app, and merchandise. In doing this, they could further impair customer privacy. These data and analytics capturing improvements could grow sharply in 2021 for businesses interested more in calculating consumer travel as opposed to monitoring the client experience and behaviour from a firm's standpoint. In getting this information, companies utilize customer travel analytics applications.

Travis DeShazo is, to paraphrase Cake's 2001 song "Comfort Eagle," building a religion. He is building it bigger. He is increasing the parameters. The results are fairly convincing, too, at least as far as synthetic scripture (his words) goes. "Not a god of the void or of chaos, but a god of wisdom," reads one message, posted on the @gods_txt Twitter feed for GPT-2 Religion A.I. "This is the knowledge of divinity that I, the Supreme Being, impart to you. When a man learns this, he attains what the rest of mankind has not, and becomes a true god. Another message, this time important enough to be pinned to the top of the timeline, proclaims: "My sayings are a remedy for all your biological ills.

Do you read me, HAL?" said astronaut Dave Bowman, desperately trying to keep his emotions in check. There was a pause and then, in an emotionless monotone, the computer responded. Was HAL, the all-powerful A.I. that controlled the Discovery One spacecraft, really ignoring him? "I'm sorry, Dave," HAL continued. "I'm afraid I can't do that." "What's the problem?" Dave asked. I've forgotten how to open them."

Architecture designed and built in 1921 won't look the same as a building from 1971 or from 2021. Trends change, materials evolve, and issues like sustainability gain importance, among other factors. But what if this evolution wasn't just about the types of buildings architects design, but was, in fact, key to how they design? While designers have long since used tools like Computer Aided Design (CAD) to help conceptualize projects, proponents of generative design want to go several steps further. They want to use algorithms that mimic evolutionary processes inside a computer to help design buildings from the ground up.

Since at least 1950, when Alan Turing's famous "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" paper was first published in the journal Mind, computer scientists interested in artificial intelligence have been fascinated by the notion of coding the mind. The mind, so the theory goes, is substrate independent, meaning that its processing ability does not, by necessity, have to be attached to the wetware of the brain. We could upload minds to computers or, conceivably, build entirely new ones wholly in the world of software. This is all familiar stuff. While we have yet to build or re-create a mind in software, outside of the lowest-resolution abstractions that are modern neural networks, there are no shortage of computer scientists working on this effort right this moment.