With geopolitical instability during an omicron surge, the AI of military factions are under the microscope. With Russia/Ukraine, China/India and China/Taiwan borders under pressure, there's a greater danger of A.I being misused in geographical tensions. Terminators were once just a movie. Engineers in Korea have developed a highly dexterous robotic hand that's capable of crushing beer cans or gently clutching an egg. It looks nearly exactly like those old movies.

In this special guest feature, Debra Goldfarb from Intel writes that her recent panel discussion at SC16 illustrated just how fast Artificial Intelligence is advancing all around us. Computational science has come a long way with machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) in just the last year. Leading centers of high-performance computing are making great strides in developing and running ML/DL workloads on their systems. Users and algorithm scientists are continuing to optimize their codes and techniques that run their algorithms, while system architects work out the challenges they still face on various system architectures. At SC16, I had the honor of hosting three of HPC's thought leaders in a panel to get their ideas about the state of Artificial Intelligence (AI), today's challenges with the technology, and where it's going. My guests were Nick Nystrom from Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), Ivan Rodero from Rutgers University, and Prabhat from NERSC at Berkeley National Laboratory. They answered both questions I put to them and from the audience.

Like many in Silicon Valley, technology entrepreneur Bryan Johnson sees a future in which intelligent machines can do things like drive cars on their own and anticipate our needs before we ask. What's uncommon is how Johnson wants to respond: find a way to supercharge the human brain so that we can keep up with the machines. From an unassuming office in Venice Beach, his science-fiction-meets-science start-up, Kernel, is building a tiny chip that can be implanted in the brain to help people suffering from neurological damage caused by strokes, Alzheimer's or concussions. Top neuroscientists who are building the chip -- they call it a neuroprosthetic -- hope that in the longer term, it will be able to boost intelligence, memory and other cognitive tasks. The medical device is years in the making, Johnson acknowledges, but he can afford the time.

There is a downside to the rise of AI beyond the irrational "rise of the machines" fear. A prime example of this is the resistance to driverless cars as a practical transportation tool. This exemplifies why it will never be possible for us to allow full artificial intelligence to blossom and take over control. Microsoft's AI chatbot is also an example of this failure to relinquish control. For true AI to develop completely, we would have to allow it to truly build and develop personality, emotion and perhaps most critically, a point of view that could drastically differ from our own.