Connect, download a free E-Book, watch a keynote, or browse my blog. What Artificial Intelligence (AI) helps take away with one hand, namely privacy, even if you're wearing masks, and with the Chinese relatively dystopian feeling Social Credit Scoring (SCS) system being a prime example, it gives with the other. And as for what it gives back, ironically, that's also privacy. Well, just one of the many ways that companies strip away our privacy is by using facial recognition, for example, from images and video, which they then use to track us, monitor us, and profile us all. Now, however, the same AI technology that's behind DeepFakes could soon be used to help anonymize and hide us online and confuse these facial recognition systems.

Connect, download a free E-Book, watch a keynote, or browse my blog. Recently, I discussed how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a new breed of Creative Machines was being used to help design everything from cities to NASA planetary rovers, and now architecture studio Wallgren Arkitekter and Swedish construction company BOX Bygg have created an AI design tool called Finch that can generate new building floor plans and adapt them according to the space available – and while this might sound like quirky work, as we begin to 3D print everything from military barracks through to family homes and 80 storey skyscrapers, having an AI that can help design buildings will no doubt come in very handy indeed. Furthermore, as AI and drone technology helps us develop the world's first fully autonomous construction sites this additional development could mean one day machines control the entire construction process – from initial building concept and design, through to final construction and fit outs. Finch, that you can see working below, will be launched in 2020 as a plug-in to visual programming tool Grasshopper within 3D computer graphics software Rhino. "The idea of Finch is to create a more user-friendly tool for architects to be able to enjoy the benefits of parametric design without any knowledge of Grasshopper or coding," said Pamela Wallgren, co-founder of Wallgren Arkitekter.

Connect, download a free E-Book, watch a keynote, or browse my blog. Recently I discussed how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is helping analyse and diagnose everything from cancer and depression to dementia and PTSD, among many other things including even a person's personality and their intent to criminality using nothing more than a clever app. Now, in a next step, excusing the pun, a team of researchers have figured out how to categorise people's emotions using AI from the way they walk. And the tech could be used to gauge everything from the mood of shoppers, to the emotional state and mental health of an entire population. It's also not the only tech that can do this – you might be surprised to learn that AI can also turn your home Wi-Fi router into a radar spy that can analyse the state of your emotions and your health.

Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. You've heard of self-driving cars and trucks, flying cars, and probably even self-driving cargo ships, but soon we'll be able to add a new type of vehicle to the self-driving category – spacecraft. And if you're going to spend millions of dollars on a spacecraft, you might as well try to cram in as much as possible. With that in mind, the European Space Agency (ESA) has now detailed the "side mission" it's planning for the asteroid-visiting spacecraft Hera. After the projects main work is accomplished, which is to bump the asteroid off course, the new spacecraft will then test out some new autonomous navigation systems, which should help future spacecraft get around without relying on ground control all the way back on Earth – something that the agency sees as a necessity as we continue to explore the further reaches of space – and one day visit them.

Connect, download a free E-Book, watch a keynote, or browse my blog. In the early days of life on Earth, biological organisms were exceedingly simple. They were microscopic unicellular creatures with little to no ability to coordinate – a little like me still to be frank, especially after I've been travelling. Yet billions of years of evolution through competition and natural selection led to the complex life forms we have today – as well as complex human intelligence. Researchers at OpenAI, the San Francisco based for-profit AI research lab, are now testing a hypothesis – if you could mimic that kind of competition in a virtual world, would it also give rise to much more sophisticated artificial intelligence?

Connect, download a free E-Book, watch a keynote, or browse my blog. Recently, I talked about a team of researchers in the US that had managed to 3D print an Artificial Intelligence (AI) neural network, and another team that had made a complex neural network from DNA. But now, in another new development in the field of what's known as Diffractive Neural Networks, a team of researchers have created the smartest piece of glass in the known universe. Zongfu Yu at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his colleagues have created a glass based AI that uses light to recognise and distinguish between images. What's more, the glass AI doesn't need to be powered to operate.

Last year the credit reporting agency Equifax announced that malicious hackers had leaked the personal information of over 143 million people after their system was hacked, and while that's concerning it's long been known that if a hacker wants to access your online data by simply guessing your password then there's a high chance you'll be toast in less than an hour. Now though after a recent announcement there's even more bad news for users – scientists at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey have found a way using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create a program that, when combined with existing hacker tools, took just minutes to figure out more than a quarter of all the passwords from a set of more than 43 million LinkedIn profiles. And perhaps yours was one of them…? Despite this concerning turn of events though the same researchers say the technology may also be able to be used to beat hackers at their own game by helping users measure the strength of their passwords. "The new technique could also potentially be used to generate decoy passwords to help detect breaches," says Thomas Ristenpart, a computer scientist who studies computer security at Cornell Tech in New York who wasn't involved with the study, which is something that another team accomplished last year by creating a bot that tells you when your accounts have been hacked even when the companies being hacked didn't know, or didn't fess up to the fact.

Connect, download a free E-Book, watch a keynote, or browse my blog. The recent boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has led to the emergence of an entirely new field of research dedicated to using AI's, or Creative Machines as they're also known, to create synthetic content – or in laymans terms create "fake" digital content without the involvement of humans that includes everything from audio tracks, and imagery, to videos. As part of this new trend I recently reported how Promethean AI was using its AI to help people create game environments just by talking and describing what they wanted, and how Nvidia had created an AI that could take in a real video feed, from a city for example, and transform it in real time into digital content that could be used to create game environments as well as VR worlds. And at the time both of these were huge breakthroughs in the field. Now, in their latest research the same team behind the original Nvidia breakthrough have published research showing how AI generated video and visuals can be combined with a traditional video game engine "to create a hybrid graphics system" that could one day be used in video games, movies, and virtual reality.

Connect, download a free E-Book, watch a keynote, or browse my blog. All around the world the trade in art, both man made and machine made art, is booming, with even art made by new Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs getting in on the act after a painting by one sold for over $430,000 recently at Christies, but detecting art forgeries is still as hard and expensive as ever. At the moment, for example, art historians might bring suspect work into a lab for infrared spectroscopy, radiometric dating, gas chromatography, or a combination of tests. But now a new AI does away with all that and it can spot fakes just by looking at the strokes used to compose a piece. In a new paper, researchers from Rutgers University and the Atelier for Restoration & Research of Paintings in the Netherlands document how their AI system broke down almost 300 line drawings by Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, and other famous artists into 80,000 individual strokes.

Interested in the future and want to experience even more?! eXplore More. Elon Musk's Neuralink, the secretive commercial company developing Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) that one day they hope will connect human minds directly with AI's and machines, this week took the wrapper off the technology they've been developing. The company's goal, says Musk, is to eventually begin implanting devices in paralysed people so that they can control computers and smartphones with nothing more than their thoughts. And even though Musk gets a lot of the limelight in this area recently the US Military flexed their muscles and showed off their own version of Musk's technology that allowed paralysed volunteers to control fleets of F-35 fighter jets with just their thoughts, and elsewhere Mark Zuckerberg and his team are busy designing non-invasive BMI as part of his attempt to turn Facebook into the "world's first telepathic network." The first big advance Musk showed off was Neuralink's flexible bio-compatible "Threads," which are less likely to damage the brain than the materials used in many of today's traditional invasive BMI's.