The video above will be familiar to anyone who's played the 3D world-building game Minecraft. The algorithm takes its cue from the "Game of Life," a so-called cellular automaton. There, squares in a grid turn black or white over a series of timesteps based on how many of their neighbors are black or white. The program mimics biological development, in which cells in an embryo behave according to cues in their local environment. Some researchers have replaced the simple rules (e.g., any white square with three black neighbors turns black) with more complex ones decided by neural networks, machine-learning algorithms that roughly mimic the brain's wiring.

Artificial intelligence can be a force for good, but society needs to be careful to make sure its negative aspects do not outweigh its positives, Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff told CNBC's Jim Cramer on Wednesday. "AI has tremendous opportunity, but technology is never good or bad, it's what we do with the technology that matters," the billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist said on "Mad Money." Benioff, co-CEO and chairman of Salesforce, said there could be "dramatic consequences" as AI use in the military accelerates, for example. The Pentagon released its first AI strategy in February. "But we can use AI for good as well," said Benioff, who is promoting "Trailblazer," the new book he co-authored with Salesforce executive Monica Langley.

LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA--Every time you talk, your body moves in sync, whether it's something as subtle as eyes widening or more extreme movements like flailing arms. Now, researchers have designed an artificial intelligence that knows how you're going to move based purely on the sound of your voice. Researchers collected 144 hours of video of 10 people speaking, including a nun, a chemistry teacher, and five TV show hosts (Conan O'Brien, Ellen DeGeneres, John Oliver, Jon Stewart, and Seth Meyers). They used an existing algorithm to produce skeletal figures representing the positions of the speakers' arms and hands. They then trained their own algorithm with the data, so it would predict gestures based on fresh audio of the speakers.

Transporting yourself into a video game, body and all, just got easier. Artificial intelligence has been used to create 3D models of people's bodies for virtual reality avatars, surveillance, visualizing fashion, or movies. But it typically requires special camera equipment to detect depth or to view someone from multiple angles. A new algorithm creates 3D models using standard video footage from one angle. The system has three stages.