While the push-pull between defenders and attackers using artificial intelligence continues, there's another security dimension to machine intelligence that should be of concern. Just as the rise of IoT devices has created an inadvertent new threat surface ripe for introducing vulnerabilities, some say that AI developers are rushing their wares to market without building in appropriate security controls. While we are not talking about IA doomsday predictions for humanity from the likes of Elon Musk, there are a number of experts urging promoters of AI to pump the brakes when it comes to cybersecurity. "In traditional engineering, safety is built in upfront – but in software applications, security is all too often brought in from the rear," said Mark Testoni, CEO of SAP's NS2 national security division. "Developers are instead thinking about consumer convenience or running an enterprise. Most businesses will try to create more convenience for customers and employees, which means more connections and IoT devices, and using tools like AI."

Three years later, they emerge with a funnel-shaped robot that enfolds the mammalian heart, then actively compresses and twists it to restore normal blood flow after heart failure. Okay, so that's not how it actually happened, but the robot is real. Today, a team of researchers at Harvard University and Boston Children's Hospital, among other participating institutions, published details on an implantable, soft-robotic device that could help failing hearts pump blood without ever touching the blood. The work, including a proof-of-concept experiment with live pigs, was published this week in Science Translational Medicine. Traditional ventricular assist devices (VADs) are used to bypass a failing heart.

He spoke alongside a series of images projected onto the wall that once held a movie screen, and at one point, he showed off a nearly 500-year-old double portrait by German Renaissance painter Hans Holbein. The portrait includes a strangely distorted image of a human skull, and as Agüera y Arcas explained, it's unlikely that Holbein painted this by hand. He almost certainly used mirrors or lenses to project the image of a skull onto a canvas before tracing its outline. "He was using state-of-the-art technologies," Agüera y Arcas told his audience. Neural networks are not only driving the Google search engine but spitting out art for which some people will pay serious money. His point was that we've been using technology to create art for centuries--that the present isn't all that different from the past.