Pindar Van Arman is a painter — and a software designer. His latest project? A portrait-painting robot. Its paintings "dance on the edge" between creations by humans and machines, he says.
Can a computer program craft passable prose — something readers can't distinguish from human-authored stuff? How about poetry, or dance mixes? New contests pose those challenges.
Should artificial intelligence mimic human behavior? The executive in charge of developing future generations of IBM's Watson tackles that and other questions about the limits and powers of AI.
The electric car company Tesla is now becoming the self-driving carmaker. Today it releases software to tens of thousands of Model S owners to automate steering, lane change and parallel parking.
From self-driving cars to automated warehouses, humans are being pushed out of the equation. Soon, robots will "do a million other things we can't even conceive of," author John Markoff says.
Already, researcher Stuart Russell says, sentry robots in South Korea "can spot and track a human being for a distance of 2 miles — and can very accurately kill that person."
As artificial intelligence alters human connection, Louisa Hall's characters wrestle with whether machines can truly feel. Some "feel they have to stand up for a robot's right to exist," Hall says.
Forget chess. Poker may be even harder for a computer. But a software program has now "solved" a variant of Texas Hold'em, the bot's creators say. And nothing can keep it from winning.
For the first time, a computer passed the test for machines engaging in intelligent thought. Linguist Geoff Nunberg says the real test is whether computers can behave the same way thinking people do.