The US presidential election campaign is in its final days. Donald Trump is behind in the polls and the pundits are predicting a win for his Democrat challenger, former vice president Joe Biden. He boasts that he will win again. With two weeks to go, his campaign unleashes an offensive in the crucial swing states: adverts, Facebook posts, WhatsApp groups and tweets. They warn of violent crime and civil unrest driven by immigrants and gangs, playing up Trump's endorsement by evangelicals and smearing Biden as a closet atheist. The initiative works and Trump snatches another unlikely victory.

The US presidential election campaign is in its final days. Donald Trump is behind in the polls and the pundits are predicting a win for his Democrat challenger, former vice president Joe Biden. He boasts that he will win again. With two weeks to go, his campaign unleashes an offensive in the crucial swing states: adverts, Facebook posts, WhatsApp groups and tweets. They warn of violent crime and civil unrest driven by immigrants and gangs, playing up Trump's endorsement by evangelicals and smearing Biden as a closet atheist. The initiative works and Trump snatches another unlikely victory.

In 2016, a Microsoft chatbot went on racist, misogynistic Twitter rants. Later that same year, Facebook had to shut down two AI robots that had started communicating with each other in a new, unfamiliar language. And then in 2017, viewers nervously watched Google's deep learning machine system's stick figure teach itself how to walk, fumbling its way through the digital course onscreen and throwing its hands and legs up in the air to leap to the finish line. As intriguing as they can be, some of artificial intelligence's efforts at mimicking human behavior leave us feeling slightly sketched out. Now, a group of researchers from the University of Oxford, Boston University and University of Agder in Norway is working on AI that goes a little deeper than an animated paper clip.

In the United States, the nones have it. The nones being people with no organized religion and increasingly no belief in God or a universal spiritual power. They have the momentum, attention, and an expectation that in the future they will become a majority of the population, just as they currently are in western Europe, Japan, and China. Or so says the Pew Research Religious Landscape Study, which in 2015 found that almost a quarter of Americans profess no religious affiliation. Within that group, a third do not believe in God or a higher power of any sort ("nothing in particular," as the study termed it). Both numbers are up from a similar study in 2007, when 16 percent of the country professed no religious affiliation, and 22 percent of these did not believe in God.