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With a reported tie-up between Google’s self-driving car efforts and the automaker Ford, the era of autonomous vehicles is getting closer. The impact is likely to shake up the balance of power in the global auto industry and among the technology elite. At stake is nothing less than trillions of dollars.

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The are over 13,000 Magic: The Gathering cards, each of which fits uniquely into an incredibly rich, decades-old world of lore, rules, tokens, and tournaments. It takes years to master the game, and even then a new set of cards comes every few months to shake things up.

That’s why it’s wonderful to see what kinds of innovation and oddity a days old artificial intelligence can come up with.

AIMTG_2I’m sorry…What does morph do again?

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Musk opens up about autonomous vehicles, self-driving car rules, and the competition.

In Elon Musk’s world, “easy” is used to describe problems many might consider impossible—or at least very difficult to solve. Producing a fully autonomous vehicle that can operate in any condition and on any road, for example, is easy-ish. And Tesla Motors TSLA 0.91%, the all-electric automaker that Musk heads, is two years away from achieving it.

“I think we have all the pieces, and it’s just about refining those pieces, putting them in place, and making sure they work across a huge number of environments—and then we’re done,” Musk told Fortune with assuredness during his commute to SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., where he is also CEO. “It’s a much easier problem than people think it is. But it’s not like George Hotz, a one-guy-and-three-months problem. You know, it’s more like, thousands of people for two years.”

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When you walk into Eatsa, a new restaurant at the Village at Westfield Topanga, there is no host, no waiters or even tables. The restaurant is an empty space lined with iPads on one wall, interactive clear cubbies (glass doors) on another, and a wall outfitted with motion sensors that dispense cutlery.

This is fast food the Eatsa way. The restaurant, which has a location in San Francisco, is completely automated — minus the food preparation.

“There are three people in the back that make everything from scratch,” said Travis Jones, who is head of the culinary operations at both Eatsa locations. “We believe in blending technology and proper culinary skills, and it’s a blend that makes the whole process work.”

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Last Friday at the Neural Information and Processing Systems conference in Montreal, Canada, a team of artificial intelligence luminaries announced OpenAI, a non-profit company set to change the world of machine learning.

Backed by Tesla and Space X’s Elon Musk and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, OpenAI has a hefty budget and even heftier goals. With a billion dollars in initial funding, OpenAI eschews the need for financial gains, allowing it to place itself on sky-high moral grounds.

artificial-general-intelligenceBy not having to answer to industry or academia, OpenAI hopes to focus not just on developing digital intelligence, but also guide research along an ethical route that, according to their inaugural blog post, “benefits humanity as a whole.”

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Full Title:
Transitioning to a Post-Employment, Post-Scarcity, Post-Money Economy in Which Collective Human and Machine Meaning Making Reigns.

Speaker:
Ben Goertzel, AGI Society, OpenCog Foundation.

December 4, 2015, Brussels.

Workshop on Offer Networks, http://onet.globalbraininstitute.org
The Global Brain Institute.
Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

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This week, Google released a research paper chronicling one of its latest forays into artificial intelligence.

Researchers at the company programmed an advanced type of “chatbot” that learns how to respond in conversations based on examples from a training set of dialogue.

And the bot doesn’t just answer by spitting out canned answers in response to certain words; it can form new answers from new questions.

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