Xbox users in the US face price increases up to 50 percent on their monthly gaming subscription, making it a great time to check if you're on the right tier or if you even need to subscribe at all. Like it or loathe it, we live in a subscription economy. Music, movies, meal boxes, and more are no longer things you buy once. Gaming is no exception, and while every major player in the sector has some form of sub for players--from PlayStation Plus and Nintendo Switch Online for consoles to Apple Arcade on phones--none of them offered quite as much for a modest monthly fee as Xbox Game Pass. Depending on the subscription tier, the service gave players access to a significant library of titles and was available on Xbox consoles, PC, or via cloud gaming.

The electric vehicle tax credit is gone, and Tesla's new, more affordable models don't quite close the gap. For nearly two decades, CEO Elon Musk has promised Tesla would make a more affordable electric vehicle, to, as he put it in 2006, "help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy." On Tuesday, Tesla announced a new Model Y and Model 3 Standard, versions of its popular compact SUV and sedan stripped of a few higher-end touches and features to bring the price down to $39,990 and $36,990, respectively. They're both about $5,000 cheaper than the Premium variants, which goes a ways--but not all the way--toward recouping the $7,500 tax credit canceled by the GOP-led Congress this past summer . The price point also puts Tesla's newest models firmly in the "more affordable" EV camp.

Speech recognition or machine translation have entered the lives of millions of people but, to make the machine learning (ML) algorithms behind them work better, it takes a lot of annotated and structured data. One way to get this data is by creating your own using specialized tools, an approach for which Christophe Ré coined the term'Data Programming'. We now compare corpora annotated by hand and by humans as'Gold Standard' with'Silver Standard' data created semi-automatically by artificial means. While Ré's group has produced its own set of tools to do this (called'Snorkel'), we decided to address the problem from the angle of programming. Having spent many years doing research on formal grammars, I watched these so-called symbolic methods gradually decline in favour of statistical approaches.

We had to go through a whole process of development and discovery, and, as a result of computer experts working hand in hand with domain experts over the course of 15 to 20 years, computers and specialized software were developed to suit different needs. Most people now are familiar with conversion rate optimization (CRO), where site operators try to maximize conversions by testing new ideas for design, messaging, user experience, and more. The operator sets parameters and goals, but the AI decides the combination of ideas, always trying to find a better answer and better results against that goal. And just like computerization, AI enablement will only be fully achieved once all of us can be considered AI experts by today's standards.

Movies like I, Robot, Wall-e and Bicentennial Man pose interesting questions that blur lines between man and machines. Now that we step forward into the "cognitive era" with machines capable of thinking and taking decisions just like humans, the question of what should be the guiding star for our actions is gaining a newfound importance. This is yet another issue that we must contend with, and that is – we must decide as to not only which ethical principles must be encoded into our man-made machines to think like us, but also how to encode these ethics. While for the most part, "Thou shalt not kill" remains a cornerstone of a principle for coding intelligence in AI.