Now you can think your way into orgasm with a new sex toy powered by brain waves. Using an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset and the Autoblow AI, a masturbation device, participants imagine moving different body parts to activate specific functions, such as starting, slowing, speeding up, or finishing. The mind-controlled fellatio gadget is designed to eliminate the need to operate a handheld device, which could be a game changer for those with mobility issues. While the device connected men to a brain interface, the creator Brian Sloan said it could control any sex toy with an electrical output to a motor, including vibrators. The entrepreneur has become a household name in the sex toy industry with his first Autoblow device that uses electricity, silicone, and plastic to simulate sexual feelings.

Petheo leads the firm's projects and partnerships in the Asia-Pacific region and advises globally on international development and humanitarian assistance. She also works on preparedness in the Asia-Pacific region with the United States Agency for International Development. "We're doing programming on the engagement of the private sector in disaster risk management in Indonesia, which is a very disaster-prone country," she says. "Smaller and medium-sized businesses are important contributors to job creation and economic development. When they go down, the impact on lives, livelihoods, and the community's ability to respond and recover effectively is extreme. We work to strengthen their own understanding of their risk and that of their surrounding community, lead them through an action-planning process to build resilience, and link that with larger policy initiatives at the national level."

OpenAI has just released the full version of GPT-2 for anyone to explore. With 1.5 billion parameters, this AI is by far the most powerful language model I've ever seen, trained on eight million web pages and capable of generating human-sounding text in many different styles. You can experience the model for yourself at Talk To Transformer, a website created by Adam King that runs the full-powered GPT-2 model for anyone to sample. Just feed the AI any text prompt, and it will generate a response that could easily pass for a piece of human writing. For instance, I typed "When will GPT-2 write its first novel?"

The following is an excerpt of You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place by Janelle Shane. Listen to a radio interview with Janelle Shane about the mistakes artificial intelligence can make. Will the music, movies, and novels of the future be written by AI? Maybe at least partially. AI-generated art can be striking, weird, and unsettling: infinitely morphing tulips; glitchy humans with half-melted faces; skies full of hallucinated dogs. AT. rex may turn into flowers or fruit; the Mona Lisa may take on a goofy grin; a piano riff may turn into an electric guitar solo.

The Roguelike Celebration happened earlier this month at GitHub in San Francisco. Fiction writer Robin Sloan gave a talk, "Writing with the machine: GPT-2 and text generation" at the conference. In this project, Sloan utilized OpenAI's GPT-2 algorithm to write short fantasy stories with help from the general public. To keep things literary, Sloan created a backstory for these stories. In a nutshell, a group of wizards is simulating quests to defeat the dark lord of the land.

A new hands-free stroker that knows how to please. Brian Sloan had a vision: to create the most realistic--and thus pleasurable--form of erotic technology he could. With the Autoblow 2, a robotic oral sex simulator for men, his company set a crowdfunding record on IndieGoGo. Now four years later, Sloan has and has upped the stakes with a new incarnation embracing cutting-edge technology. The Autoblow A.I. reportedly offers improved performance and 10 distinct oral sex experiences, all thanks to artificial intelligence.

But the input can be pushed in certain directions. A quarter-century ago, an electronic surveillance consultant named Scott French used a supercharged Mac to imitate Jacqueline Susann's sex-drenched tales. His approach was different from Mr. Sloan's. Mr. French wrote thousands of computer-coded rules suggesting how certain character types derived from Ms. Susann's works might plausibly interact. It took Mr. French and his Mac eight years to finish the tale -- he reckoned he could have done it by himself in one.

Every year cyber attacks are becoming more sophisticated and frequent -- and it's predicted they'll cost the world $8 trillion by 2022. But a company founded by mathematicians and ex-spies is trying to change the way organizations protect themselves from hackers. British cyber security firm Darktrace is using artificial intelligence to create a "cyber immune system." Usually, companies try to anticipate what an attack would look like and ask their computers to look for anomalies that match that description. But Darktrace says it has come up with a system that learns what is normal behavior within a company's network, and can then make intelligent judgments to spot emerging threats -- even if it experiences a new, complex attack that it's never seen before.

In this day and age, under our current political conditions, you'd be forgiven for mistaking lightness for triteness, escape for escapism. There's a sense that our fictions should be of Earth-shattering import in the obvious ways, and this perhaps desensitizes us to other examples of subversion and narrative. It may also make us miss out on some great fiction about odd bread, an imaginary country and the processes behind making robot arms. All of which is to say that Robin Sloan's delightful new novel, "Sourdough," the follow-up to his runaway success "Mr. It is that rare thing: a satire that has a love of what it satirizes while also functioning as a modern fairy tale about, of all things, the magic of certain carbohydrates. For this to be a chemical rather than physical reaction, Sloan must display a sure and natural knowledge of high-tech culture and of bread culture (in both senses). His keen insight into both automatons and organic foods stems from his immersion in the San ...

When machines are able to do anything humans can -- be it farming, factory-working, or stock-trading -- they'll do it in a fraction of the time, experts reason, eventually rendering the human workforce redundant. Even creative fields aren't safe: artificial intelligence has already begun making its mark in journalism, fine art, and music. How could something so fundamentally subjective, so human, as art be mechanized? In fact, the Oakland-based novelist and self-described "tech-adjacent media inventor" is so unbothered by the idea, he's already invited robots into his workplace. Earlier this year, Sloan, a former Twitter employee, pieced together a program powered by basic applied AI to co-write short stories with him.