Like fire, artificial intelligence is both'productive and perilous.' For some, artificial intelligence (AI) promises transformative progress. For others, the promise is dystopian, one that can bring an end to the human race. Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie address both sides in their book, The New Fire: War, Peace and Democracy in the Age of AI, says cyber analyst James Voorhees in a review of the book. "Much of the current commentary about AI, democracy, and China is alarmist," writes Voorhees.

The girls were dancing on a neon tank, wearing sequined bikinis lit up by red and green laser light. A strobing fixed-wing aircraft passed overhead like the acid-trip kissing cousin of a Mitsubishi A6M Zero, with more sequined women dangling from it, trapeze-style. Flashing robots had preceded them -- wheeling through the room, pumping their fists at the crowd -- while the audience, seated on tiers of glittery red plastic swivel chairs, waved glow sticks. As the music throbbed, twin walls of video screens threw up bizarre images. The Technicolor dream machine the women were using as a stage displayed, at the end of its barrel, a rainbow-colored star -- just where, on an ordinary tank, the death comes out. But this was no ordinary tank. It was a fixture of the one-hour show that takes place three times a night at Robot Restaurant, a kind of eye-melting Japanese dinner theater, a cabaret show of such migraine-inducing decadence that Las Vegas falls silent before it. On this hot Tokyo night in July 2013, two Americans, Roger Ver and Nicolas Cary, sat in the crowd. As far as Cary could tell, they were the only gaijin in the place. He was drinking a beer, while Ver, as usual, was abstaining. Their unappetizing bento boxes sat untouched: you don't go to Robot Restaurant for the food. In the midst of the cartoonish spectacle -- earlier, a woman wielding an oversized mace had ridden in on a stegosaurus to battle two heavily armored robots -- they had business to discuss.

So far, the experiments with word sense disambiguation techniques have been disappointing. Voorhees (1993) uses the word senses in the lexicon WorldNet for disambiguation. The improvement of the retrieval is modest. The sense disambiguation is very difficult in short query statements. Missing correct matches because of incorrect sense resolution have a deleterious effect on retrieval performance.