The people who study nuclear war for a living are certain that artificial intelligence will soon power the deadly weapons. None of them are quite sure what, exactly, that means. In the middle of July, Nobel laureates gathered at the University of Chicago to listen to nuclear war experts talk about the end of the world. In closed sessions over two days, scientists, former government officials, and retired military personnel enlightened the laureates about the most devastating weapons ever created. The goal was to educate some of the most respected people in the world about one of the most horrifying weapons ever made and, at the end of it, have the laureates make policy recommendations to world leaders about how to avoid nuclear war.

Feedback is New Scientist's popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com Now and then, Feedback sees ads for courses promising to teach us how to become an excellent creative writer. It sounds like fun, but why learn to be a good writer when we can just do this stuff instead? One brand that recently caught Feedback's eye is BBC Maestro.

Two pioneers of artificial intelligence – John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton – won the Nobel Prize in physics Oct. 8 for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats to humanity, one of the winners said. Mr. Hinton, who is known as the Godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto, and Mr. Hopfield is an American working at Princeton. "This year's two Nobel Laureates in physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today's powerful machine learning," the Nobel committee said in a press release. Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two laureates "used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets." She said that such networks have been used to advance research in physics and "have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation. Mr. Hinton predicted that AI will end up having a "huge influence" on civilization, bringing improvements in productivity and health care. "It would be comparable with the Industrial Revolution," he said in the open call with reporters and the officials from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. "Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it's going to exceed people in intellectual ability.

The debate surrounding the world's population and the collective plan of action to tackle overpopulation has its proponents and critics. Some believe we're definitely headed towards an overpopulation crisis, while others think we'll be experiencing a catastrophic population decrease. Granted, this debate can be an entirely separate story in itself, but let's take a look at one side of the coin first. With regard to overpopulation, AI expert and renowned behavioral psychologist Catriona Campbell believes that'Tamagotchi children' could pose a very real future for parents 50 years from now, outlined in her recently published book – AI by Design: A Plan for Living with Artificial Intelligence. A survey involving a slew of Nobel Laureates cites population rise and its link to environmental degradation as the biggest threat to humankind.

Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels describes a'wonderful machine' that permits "the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour" to "write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius." Imagine my surprise and delight when, nearly 300 years later, I stumbled across EleutherAI's version of this very machine: GPT-Neo. With a few clicks, I was able to generate hundreds of thousands of words. More specifically, I was able to create Wikipedia-style biographies for the 118 Nobel Laureates in Literature without the hassle of research, the despair of a blank page, or the need, really, to labor at all. I discovered the GPT-Neo's ability to generate Wikipedia pages accidentally.

Among the 22 Turing Laureates in attendance at the conference were: Front row, from left: Whitfield Diffie (2015), Martin Hellman (2015), Robert Tarjan (1986), Barbara Liskov (2008). Second row, from left: Vinton Cerf (2004), Richard Karp (1985), Richard Stearns (1993), Dana Scott (1976).

From 2008: "WALL-E" trailer features the stars from "Toy Story." The results are in, and the latest laureates in the Robot Hall of Fame range from the absolutely lovable WALL-E cartoon character to the positively scary BigDog robo-runner. This year's class, announced during a Tuesday night ceremony at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, also includes the pint-sized, soccer-playing NAO humanoid robot and the PackBot bomb-disposal robot. The Robot Hall of Fame was created in 2003 by Carnegie Mellon University to recognize excellence in robotics technology. More than two dozen machines, real and fictional, have been inducted over the past nine years, but the Class of 2012 is the first to be selected by popular vote instead of a panel of judges.

I have just returned from the fourth annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum and I want to emphasize how very important it has been for ACM Turing laureates to participate in the program. Each year 200 math and computer science undergraduates participate in the program, approximately 100 each. Speeches by laureates are mixed with undergraduate workshops and plenary open sessions. There is ample opportunity for interaction among students and laureates and between students. This year, Brian Schmidt gave the Lindau lecture (from the annual Nobel Prize winners meeting).

The 2016 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded for the design and synthesis of the world's smallest machines. The work has overtones of science fiction, but holds huge promise in fields as diverse as medicine, materials and energy. This is especially true of efforts to develop nano-scale machines (1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair), which are always destined to remain tiny however big our ambitions for them grow. It's difficult to trace the development of molecular machines to one person or scientific step. But a 1959 lecture by the celebrated physicist Richard Feynman is as good a point as any.

Among the innovations pioneered by John White during his years as CEO of ACM was a new relationship with the Klaus Tschira Foundation that sponsors the Heidelberg Laureate Foruma [HLF] in the third quarter of each year. The attendees include about 200 math or computer science students and recipients of the mathematics Fields Medal, the Nevanlinna Prize, the Abel Prize, and ACM's A.M. Turing award for computer science. I have had the pleasure of attending the first three meetings of the HLF. Since 1951, however, there has been an annual meeting of Nobel laureatesb with support from several organizations including the aforementioned Klaus Tschira Foundation. The HLF is patterned after the Nobel meeting: students meet with a collection of participating laureates. It was decided last year to link these two events by having a Nobel laureate address the participants of the HLF and to have an HLF laureate address the participants of the Nobel annual meeting.