A Microsoft-owned tool powered by artificial intelligence is designed to make life easier for programmers, but some developers say it may be repurposing some of the billions of lines of code it was trained on without permission. The tool, called CoPilot, was released by GitHub, a Microsoft subsidiary that is used by millions of people to share source code and organise software projects.

A new paper from researchers at the University of Southern California's Brain and Creativity Institute considers a novel path toward creating robots with'feelings.' The key, according to researchers Kinson Man and Antonio Damasio, is homestasis, a self-preservation principle by which living creatures seek to maintain internal biological equilibrium by avoiding certain environments or kinds of stimuli. Were robots to be programmed with a homeostatic sense of self-preservation, would that put them on a path toward developing true feelings? According to a Science News report on the paper, Man and Damasio consider the most promising lead for feeling robots to come through the combination of soft robotics and deep learning, which when combined might approximate a homeostatic reaction to negative environmental stimuli. Man and Domasio point to a 1954 experiment by W. Ross Ashby that demonstrated how homeostatic sensing might be translated into robotics.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are causing excitement all over the world. Recent reports, such as one from Accenture, claim it has the potential to revolutionise the future of all businesses operations. For instance, research tasks that take hundreds of hours, such as candidate profiling, can now be performed by an AI within seconds. It's no wonder that many businesses are tapping into this trend – the potential savings, in both time and money, are extraordinary. However, what are the consequences of programming AI in today's environment?