Last week, at Google's annual conference dedicated to new products and technologies, the company announced a change to its premier AI product: The Bard chatbot, like OpenAI's GPT-4, will soon be able to describe images. Although it may seem like a minor update, the enhancement is part of a quiet revolution in how companies, researchers, and consumers develop and use AI--pushing the technology not only beyond remixing written language and into different media, but toward the loftier goal of a rich and thorough comprehension of the world. ChatGPT is six months old, and it's already starting to look outdated. That program and its cousins, known as large language models, mime intelligence by predicting what words are statistically likely to follow one another in a sentence. Researchers have trained these models on ever more text--at this point, every book ever and then some--with the premise that force-feeding machines more words in different configurations will yield better predictions and smarter programs.

Google's John Mueller shares his thoughts on the future of SEO and whether he sees it becoming obsolete one day. During the Google Search Central SEO hangout recorded on July 2, a question was submitted which simply asks: "What's your vision for the future of SEO?" This put Mueller on the spot as he admits he doesn't have that perfect elevator speech on the future of SEO. He addresses a common concern shared by those within the SEO industry, which is that machine learning will get so advanced Google will understand websites without any additional optimization. If Google's machine learning algorithms could understand everything about websites on their own, there would be no need for SEO.

A fatally ill man tries to secure the future of his family in a near-future world where the toxicity of the sun forces people to stay inside during the daytime in LX 2048, starring James D'Arcy (Agent Carter, Homeland). It's a flawed yet thought-provoking, surreal science-fiction film, chock-full of big ideas on our relationship to technology and what it means to be human, all beautifully anchored by D'Arcy's fantastic performance. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. D'Arcy plays Adam Bird, a married father of three on the brink of divorce from his wife, Reena (Anna Brewster). The year is 2048, and people are largely living indoors during the day because the sunlight is powerful enough to scald human skin instantly.

Prior to becoming a full-time musician, Grimes learned how to use the production software Logic for her neuroscience studies at Montreal's McGill University. The Vancouver native brought her unique perspective to Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast, where she spoke about artificial intelligence's growing capacity to create music. "I feel like we're in the end of art, human art." said Grimes, who is now going by the name c in reference to the speed of light. "Once there's actual AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), it's gonna be so much better at making art than us… Once AI can totally master science and art, which could happen in the next 10 years, probably more like 20 or 30 years." She also predicted that AI will reach a point when it will be building and creating art for itself.

On my way back from Singapore a few weeks ago, I had the chance to watch an interesting TED Talk about robots taking human jobs. It got me thinking: What would happen if robots and machines took over? Would they take every job imaginable, or just take over a few industries? Will your job become obsolete as machine learning and artificial intelligence continue to ebb into even the most mundane tasks of our daily lives? My perspective is that machines and robots will make our lives easier, but not take everyone's jobs.

The human condition is plagued by a labyrinth of shortcomings, frailties, and limitations that hinder man from reaching his fullest potential. Therefore, it only makes sense that we find ourselves at the next phase in human evolution where restricted man merges with the infinite possibilities of hyper-evolving technologies. This techno-human transmutation will prove to be "THE" quantum leap in human progression. The harmonization of technologically extending oneself, consciousness, artificial intelligence and machine learning will reverse the failures of genetic predisposition and limitation. "Cyborgification" is simply the process of compensating technologically for the inherent limitations of "natural" man.

When you decide to write a story set in the near future, or speculating about things that might happen, you're running the risk of looking like a jackass. Nobody expects a science fiction story to predict the actual future--not if they know anything about science fiction, anyway. But given how slowly publishing can move and how fast the world changes, your story can look outdated before it even sees print. I ran into this a bunch of times with my novel All the Birds in the Sky. Because this novel took so long to write, and then had another two years between getting a book deal and actually getting published, there was tons of stuff in there that I had a queasy feeling would be just completely wrong by the time this book saw the light of day.

Will the smartphone, one of the most omnipresent gadgets ever made, one day cease to exist? That's what technology reporter Matt Weinberger argues in a recent piece for Business Insider. Weinberger reasons that new technologies, like augmented and virtual reality, voice-activated assistants, and physical gestures, will eliminate the need for a smartphone. This week, we got our first look at Neuralink, a new company cofounded by Musk with a goal of building computers into our brains by way of "neural lace," a very early-stage technology that lays on your brain and bridges it to a computer. It's the next step beyond even that blending of the digital and physical worlds, as human and machine become one.

While there has been plenty of conversation over the possibility that robots will replace humans in the work force, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk believes the threat is existential for people. The billionaire warned humans will soon have to learn to communicate with artificial intelligence or face becoming obsolete. "Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence," Musk said while speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai, according to a report from CNBC. Musk, who was at the event to announce the launch of Tesla in the United Arab Emirates, suggested that a merger between humans and machines will be necessary for the species going forward, lest it find itself made irrelevant. The founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX pointed to the processing power of a computer compared to that of a person's brain, explaining that computers can communicate at "a trillion bits per second" while humans do so at about 10 bits per second.

In the aftermath of the Brexit vote to leave, one of the Tweets that caught my eye was from founder and CEO of analyst firm HfS Research Phil Fersht (@pfersht), which simply said, "at least the British can stop worrying about robots taking their jobs. Just get rid of the jobs altogether…" While that may not be amusing as it plays out against our globalized economy, it demonstrates how this topic has taken hold of so many of us. About a year ago, I was asked to sit on a panel at the annual Constellation Research Connected Enterprise called "The Robots Are Here! The Future of HR Tech," to debate whether we're entering a dystopian existence where humans are the bottleneck to productivity and innovation or a world of augmented humanity and digital humanization. It's a fact that major economic shifts have led to both marginalization, the downside, and great opportunity, clearly the upside.