Here's an interesting stat from the Pew Research Center: more than half of smart speaker owners in the US (54 percent) report saying "please" at least occasionally to their AI assistants, with one-in-five (19 percent) saying please frequently. Curiously, the question of AI politeness also breaks down along gender lines, with 62 percent of women reporting that they say "please" at least sometimes, versus 45 percent for men. One possible answer is that men are generally ruder to women, and this latter category now includes AI assistants coded as female. Experts have long noted that the design choices for AI bots could have misogynist effects by reinforcing gender stereotypes. "Because the speech of most voice assistants is female, it sends a signal that women are ... docile and eager-to-please helper," a report from the UN noted earlier this year.

The iconic line from Star Wars, in which Luke Skywalker discovers the real identity of Darth Vader, marks the point in the series when two polar opposites that had been cleanly divided--the Jedi and the Dark Side--are suddenly mixed together in the most personal of ways. This ambiguity of opposition, which is part of what makes the series so compelling, is well known. There is another example of this opposition, though, that is easier to overlook: Star Wars both humanizes machines, so that we can like them, and dehumanizes them, so we can accept their slaughter. By the conclusion of the series, we feel a genuine warmth for the droid characters, R2-D2, C-3PO, and BB-8 and a concern for their safety. But why, when we know they are just machines? Part of the answer is that R2-D2, BB-8, and C-3PO certainly act as though they have a wide range of feelings.

The iconic line from Star Wars, in which Luke Skywalker discovers the real identity of Darth Vader, marks the point in the series when two polar opposites that had been cleanly divided--the Jedi and the Dark Side--are suddenly mixed together in the most personal of ways. This ambiguity of opposition, which is part of what makes the series so compelling, is well known. There is another example of this opposition, though, that is easier to overlook: Star Wars both humanizes machines, so that we can like them, and dehumanizes them, so we can accept their slaughter. By the conclusion of the series, we feel a genuine warmth for the droid characters, R2-D2, C-3PO, and BB-8 and a concern for their safety. But why, when we know they are just machines? Part of the answer is that R2-D2, BB-8, and C-3PO certainly act as though they have a wide range of feelings.

If venture capital and research funding are any indication, artificial intelligence will play a leading role in shaping our future. And few tech innovators in the private or public sector have been as prominent in defining that role as Andrew Ng, chief scientist at China's search giant Baidu. Ng has taught AI at Stanford, led the Google Brain project, founded online education pioneer Coursera, and just last year took his post at "China's Google" in hopes of figuring out how to teach computers to see and hear, and to do that for the world's most populous country. Small wonder why China represents such a huge opportunity for machine intelligence applications. Baidu is the world's fifth most trafficked website.