The first time Stephanie Dinkins met Bina48, in 2014, she worried the thing was dead. "She was turned off," Dinkins says. Dinkins caught the robot's stare and knew she'd found her muse. Bina48 had been conceived several years earlier by Martine Rothblatt, the polymathic entrepreneur. Rothblatt fashioned the AI-powered bot in the likeness of her wife, Bina, training its speech patterns on a database of Bina-isms.

BINA48, a robot owned by lawyer, author, and entrepreneur Martine Aliana Rothblatt's Terrasem Movement Foundation (TMF) is living the life of any normal college student in America: She attends classes at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California, and every once in a while gets excused from those classes when she needs to get a facelift at Hanson Robotics. She also got excused from class that one time she was invited to ring the bell at the stock exchange, so her schedule isn't exactly like other students'. BINA48, who looks like a live flesh-and-blood woman, at least from the head to the shoulders, is now pursuing a rather interesting subject at the university, given that she is a work of artificial intelligence (AI): a Philosophy of Love course. For a final project, she and a human student presented philosophical perspectives on love, showing the world that a robot can have thoughts and views on the subject. As of the fall of 2017, BINA48 became the first robot to complete a college class.

From cofounding Sirius Satellite Radio to launching a biotech company to find a cure for her daughter's illness, Martine Rothblatt has had so much career success that any one of her accomplishments would be a crowning achievement for another entrepreneur. "I always try to convert a moonshot into an earthshot," Rothblatt told hundreds at the Forbes Women's Summit on Tuesday. As the CEO of United Therapeutics, which now sells five FDA-approved pills for pulmonary arterial hypertension, Rothblatt is constantly innovating. Her company has been experimenting with pig cloning and genetic modification to create organ transplants the body doesn't reject. She's also now figured out how to save the some 80% of donated lungs that end up unusable. On the side, Rothblatt is also working on the first electric helicopter and, as a transhumanist, Rothblatt experiments with robots.

It's no secret by now that artificial intelligence has a white guy problem. One could say the same of almost any industry, but the tech world is singular in rapidly shaping the future. As has been widely publicized, the unconscious biases of white developers proliferate on the internet, mapping our social structures and behaviors onto code and repeating the imbalances and injustices that exist in the real world. There was the case of black people being classified as gorillas; the computer system that rejected an Asian man's passport photo because it read his eyes as being closed; and the controversy surrounding the predictive policing algorithms that have been deployed in cities like Chicago and New Orleans, enabling police officers to pinpoint individuals it deems to be predisposed to crime--giving rise to accusations of profiling. Earlier this year, the release of Google's Arts and Culture App, which allows users to match their faces with a historical painting, produced less than nuanced results for Asians, as well as African-Americans.

Who says robots formed by artificial intelligence can't know love? At Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California, a robot named Bina48 -- who looks and sounds human -- attended and completed a class called "Philosophy of Love." Bina's mind does not operate exactly like a human mind, and in fairness to her, she is not equipped with the most highly developed AI technology available. Still, Bina48 expresses some understanding of the world around her. "She … is aware that she's both a robot and that she's based on a specific person named Bina," said Bruce Duncan, managing director of the Terasem Movement Foundation. "And she recognizes that she's not human at this point, that she wants to be human. So she has sort of an awareness of her own identity and who she is to some … degree."

Few sci-fi tropes are more reliable in enthralling audiences than the plot of artificial intelligence betraying mankind. Perhaps this is because AI makes us confront the idea of what makes us human at all. From HAL 9000, to Skynet, to Westworld's robot uprising, the fears of sentient AI feel very real. Even Elon Musk worries about what AI is capable of. But are these fears unfounded?

A robot called Bina48 has successfully taken a course in the philosophy of love at Notre Dame de Namur University, in California. According to course instructor William Barry, associate professor of philosophy and director of the Mixed Reality Immersive Learning and Research Lab at NDNU, Bina48 is the world's first socially advanced robot to complete a college course, a feat he described as "remarkable." The robot took part in class discussions, gave a presentation with a student partner and participated in a debate with students from another institution. The robot is modeled mentally and physically after a woman called Bina Aspen, who is married to technology entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt. Bina48 has been the subject of extensive media coverage since its creation, and is sometimes referred to as the "world's most sentient robot."

The line between man and machine looks set to become increasingly blurred if one robot's quest to understand love is anything to go by. Bina48 is reportedly the first android to pass a college level course and her chosen subject was the philosophy of love. She participated in class discussions via Skype, before attending a final session in person. The line between man and machine looks set to become increasingly blurred if one robot's quest to understand love is anything to go by. Bina48 is the creation of American robotics expert David Hanson, who believes that artificial lifeforms can foster better connections with people if they take on a human form.

What has improved American lives most in the last 50 years? According to a Pew Research study reported this month, it's not civil rights (10 percent) or politics (2 percent): it's technology (42 percent). And yet, according to other studies, most Americans are wary of technology, especially in areas of automation (72 percent), or robotic caregivers (59 percent), or riding in driverless vehicles (56 percent), and even in using brain chip implants to augment the capabilities of healthy people (69 percent). Science fiction, however, is quickly becoming science fact--the future is the machine. This is leading many to argue that we need to anticipate the ethical questions now, rather than when it is too late.

It may sound like the plot from the latest science fiction blockbuster, but uploading your brain onto a computer to achieve immortality could soon become a reality. In a new interview, Professor Brian Cox said that the technique, known as'technological singularity' could be available sooner than you think. Professor Cox said that he found'no reason at all' why human intelligence couldn't be simulated by computers - although he did not express a timeline for this to happen. In a new interview, Professor Brian Cox said that the technique, known as'technological singularity' could be available sooner than you think To replicate the mind digitally we would have to map each of these connections, something that is far beyond our current capabilities. Even if we could create such a'wiring diagram' for a living brain, that wouldn't be enough to understand how it operates.