Revenge of the hairless bipeds

Four out of the forty eight self driving cars currently operational in California have been in an accident within the last eight months, although the driverless cars were not necessarily always at fault.

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In January we were informed that the new poker playing computer was unbeatable. Guess what, it wasn't. We pesky humans can still kick ass, given the chance.

It doesn't matter if the human opponent is a master bluffer, or a blundering amateur, Bowling says — a computer using that single best strategy can eventually win.
It took Bowling years to find that winning approach. His team had to crunch the strategies with supercomputers. The final push for the ultimate strategy was crunched by a computing cluster made of nearly 5,000 CPUs, according to Michael Johanson, a graduate student on the project. It took the cluster more than two months to find the answer, Johanson says. "Almost a thousand years of computation went into this."
But at the end of all that, they had the perfect strategy, the scientists say. Well, almost perfect.
"It's just a tiny bit off," Bowling says. "And that tiny bit is so small that even if you played a lifetime — 12 hours a day, 200 hands an hour for 70 years — you still wouldn't be able to tell it apart from having played a perfect game."

The man against machine mano a mano was held at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh. For two weeks, four top poker players squared off against a computer program called Claudico,  developed by scientists at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU.) The game played was Heads-up, No-limit Texas Hold'em. Humans won. These brainy gas cans on steroids better think twice before they take on the hominids again. Machines are gettin' too uppity. 'Bout time they got a lesson.

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Steven Hawking has long sounded the clarion call, warning humans that artificial intelligence could spell mankind's ultimate doom.

Prof Stephen Hawking, one of Britain's pre-eminent scientists, has said that efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence.He told the BBC:"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."His warning came in response to a question about a revamp of the technology he uses to communicate, which involves a basic form of AI.But others are less gloomy about AI's prospects.The theoretical physicist, who has the motor neurone disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), is using a new system developed by Intel to speak.Machine learning experts from the British company Swiftkey were also involved in its creation. Their technology, already employed as a smartphone keyboard app, learns how the professor thinks and suggests the words he might want to use next.Prof Hawking says the primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far have already proved very useful, but he fears the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans."It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate," he said.CelverbotCleverbot is software that is designed to chat like a human would"Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."

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Until a computer learns to cry at a movie or tell a dirty joke, I think we have nothing to worry about. Much of being human is about experiencing emotional pain and pleasure and that's tough to teach to a transistor. Although, I must tell you, they are trying...