This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit our collection to discover "The Economist reads" guides, guest essays and more seasonal distractions. IN RECENT years artificial intelligence (AI) has undergone a revolution. After decades of modest progress that never quite lived up to its promise, a different approach--relying on big data and stats, not clever algorithms--made huge strides in solving real-world problems like voice- and image-recognition and self-driving cars. Also in the past ten years, a lot of books have been published that aim to explain what AI is, where it's going and why it matters.

The Daily Star's FREE newsletter is spectacular! Artificial intelligence (AI) will one day keep human beings around in the same way we keep plants, a scientist has claimed. James Lovelock, the veteran environmentalist best known to the wider public for his influential Gaia theory, says that while Artificial Intelligence will inevitably become the dominant form of life on Earth, AIs will want to keep us around "like we keep plants in gardens." In his latest book Novacene, Lovelock predicts that the thinking machines of the future "will have designed and built themselves from the artificial intelligence systems we have already constructed". These self-replicating artificial intelligences will quickly evolve until they become "thousands, then millions of times more intelligent than us," he adds. But he says that's nothing to be afraid of, pointing out that computers – like humans – are threatened by climate change – so keeping the planet habitable will be as important to them as it is to us: "by remarkable chance, it happens that the upper temperature for both organic and electronic life on the ocean planet Earth are almost identical and close to 50ºC".

The move allows personal and commercial borrowers to complete the entire loan-application process without entering a bank, something they could not do before the pandemic, he said. Last year, the bank launched an ambitious project to install an SAP-developed banking platform as the core of its expanding digital services, including the use of advanced artificial-intelligence tools. "We were in the middle of that when the pandemic struck," Mr. Taylor said, "and we had to reprioritize." New coronavirus cases in Oklahoma have risen 26% over the past week. The state has so far recorded 4,675 cases, including its governor, and 428 deaths.

It estimates that companies world-wide spent $31 billion on cloud services between January and March, up 34% from the same period last year. The cloud market has seen back-to-back quarterly growth in recent years as companies seek lasting changes to their information technology systems by renting infrastructure and applications from cloud providers. The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. Many companies have also sought more advanced cloud-enabled capabilities, such as data analytics, artificial intelligence and robotic software, aiming to cut costs or generate revenue from new services. But gains this year are being fueled by shorter-term needs, said Canalys chief analyst Matthew Ball.

But some transhumanists hope to slowly morph into "immortal cyborgd" with endlessly replaceable parts. Did you recently welcome a child into the world? An upstanding responsible parent such as yourself is surely doing all you can to prepare your little one for all the pitfalls life has in store. However, thanks to technology, children born in 2014 may face a far different set of issues than you ever had to. And we're not talking about simply learning to master a new generation of digital doohickeys, we're talking about living in a world in which the very definition of "human" becomes blurred.

Humankind's first glimpse of an awesome new kind of intelligence occurred on December 2018, when researchers at DeepMind, the artificial-intelligence company owned by Google's parent corporation, Alphabet Inc., filed a dispatch from what one day may be recognized as a herald of next great epoch of human evolution –the "Lucy", Australopithecus afarensis, the famous early ancestor of modern humans, of the emerging "Cyborg Epoch" of hyperintelligence. A year earlier, on Dec. 5, 2017, the New York Times reported, the team had stunned the chess world with its announcement of AlphaZero, a machine-learning algorithm that had "mastered not only chess but shogi, or Japanese chess, and Go. The algorithm started with no knowledge of the games beyond their basic rules. It then played against itself millions of times and learned from its mistakes. In a matter of hours, the algorithm became the best player, human or computer, the world has ever seen."

A prominent futurist warns that humans may soon cede their top spot on Earth's hierarchy to their own artificially intelligent creations. In a new book, scientist, environmentalist, and futurist, James Lovelock, describes what he calls the'Novacene,' -- a new age in which humans could be eclipsed by intelligent machines. 'Our supremacy as the prime understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to end,' writes Lovelock in a new book titled'Novacene' according to NBC. 'The understanders of the future will not be humans but what I choose to call'cyborgs' that will have designed and built themselves.' Humans may be forced to pass the torch due to impending disasters like climate change. In the Novacene -- which means literally'new age' -- Lovelock says that the replacement of humans won't necessarily be a violent or'Terminator'-like shift, but will instead be more of an evolutionary one. Unlike biologically driven changes of the past, organic creatures will take a backseat to technology. 'I think of cyborgs as another kingdom of life,' he tells NBC.

For tens of thousands of years, humans have reigned as our planet's only intelligent, self-aware species. But the rise of intelligent machines means that could change soon, perhaps in our own lifetimes. Not long after that, Homo sapiens could vanish from Earth entirely. "Our supremacy as the prime understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to end," he says in the book, "Novacene." "The understanders of the future will not be humans but what I choose to call'cyborgs' that will have designed and built themselves."

It is 8.30am and Britain's most eminent scientist is taking a windswept stroll through Dorset's rolling hills. It seems hard to believe that James Lovelock – sprightly despite a walking stick and bristling with a fierce, bright-eyed intelligence – will turn 100 this week. But the man known for proposing one of the most visionary scientific theories of the last century starts the day just as he always does, with a brisk walk from his coastguard's cottage by the shores of Chesil Beach with his beloved wife, Sandy. That Lovelock is conscious of his own mortality is to be expected. But that he is also musing on the future of the Earth he will never live to see – one which involves cyborgs, no less – is, perhaps, rather more surprising.

In an acerbic 1976 article on AI research, the computer scientist Drew McDermott was the first to contrast the phrases "artificial intelligence" and "natural stupidity". Four decades later, researchers warn of the threat posed by computer "superintelligence", but stupidity is still a far greater peril: both the age-old natural stupidity of humans and the newfangled artificial stupidity displayed by algorithms – such as chatbots supposed to be able to diagnose illness, or facial-recognition software that throws up false matches for ethnic minorities – in which we place far too much trust. An alternative reason to be cheerful about the coming machine takeover is offered here by the eminent scientist and inventor James Lovelock. A chemist by training, who invented instruments for Mars rovers and helped to discover the depletion of the ozone layer, Lovelock is most celebrated in pop culture for his "Gaia hypothesis". First formulated in the 1960s, it proposes that Earth and its biosphere comprise a single, self-regulating system.