Old robots never die, they simply fade away. This week, Boston Dynamics said adieu to HD Atlas, the human-ish robot that debuted over a decade ago. And then promptly introduced its replacement. For years, Atlas has scared us silly with cutesy dance moves and parkour flips that we just knew would one day lead to our annihilation as a species. The robopocalypse never came, of course, and Atlas just got cuter the more it fell off boxes, bounced off tables, rolled down grass hills, and jived to Dirty Dancing tracks.

Open.AI helps us comprehend how advanced AI systems see and ponder our world. Art is the key to this. By exploring the art that is generated by AI and looking at what captures and inspires us, we can test a broader range of ideas and fixable limitations in order to refine our systems.

One of the biggest mysteries among people working on salmon recovery in Puget Sound and the Salish Sea is what happens to juvenile fish once they head for the ocean. Survival rates of Chinook, Coho and Steelhead have all declined since the 1980s, but resource managers don't know why. A new grant from Microsoft is using artificial intelligence to greatly improve the computer models used to tackle the question. A collaborative effort called the Salish Sea Marine Survival Project has been around for nearly a decade. It unites the work of 60 different scientific and non-profit entities, all trying to understand what is preventing salmon and steelhead from coming home.

Fifteen years of technology craziness and we've finally arrived squarely in the year 2001. We're back to the future because Silicon Valley in particular (and tech in general) has hyped Big Data for several years without answering the vital question, "To what end?" Having vast amounts of data was at first a problem, then an opportunity, before it settled in as an über-talked-about way to sell just about any variety of software. You Valley types know exactly what I'm talking about. So why 2001, and June 29, 2001 to be more specific? That's the moment that the hype over artificial intelligence hit its high water mark with the release of Spielberg's film, A.I. Artificial Intelligence.