This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through July 16th)

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots
Ellen Huet | Bloomberg
"The company [X.ai] advertises Amy as an AI personal assistant who can 'magically schedule meetings'...But the system isn’t yet ready to take the next step on its own. Multiple former AI trainers said that as recently as a few months ago, trainers looked over parts of almost all incoming e-mails—to evaluate what Amy guessed the user was saying—before Amy generated an auto response...Some people might find it unnerving to message a bot only to realize it’s a human."

ROBOTICS: Robots Could Hack Turing Test by Keeping Silent
Tia Ghose | Scientific American 
"Warwick was organizing Turing tests for the 60th anniversary of Turing's death when he and his colleague Huma Shah, also a computer scientist at Coventry University, noticed something curious: Occasionally, some of the AI chatbots broke and remained silent, confusing the interrogators. 'When they did so, the judge, on every occasion, was not able to say it was a machine,' Warwick told Live Science."

HEALTH: A Medical Mystery of the Best Kind: Major Diseases Are in Decline
Gina Kolata | The New York Times
"Something strange is going on in medicine. Major diseases, like colon cancer, dementia and heart disease, are waning in wealthy countries, and improved diagnosis and treatment cannot fully explain it...But Dr. Cummings, intrigued by the waning of disease, has a provocative idea for further investigation...Perhaps, he said, all these degenerative diseases share something in common, something inside aging cells themselves."

BIOLOGY: The Unseen: Millions of Microbes Are yet to Be Discovered. Will One Hold the Ultimate Cure?