Come January, the "Westworld" concept of lifelike sex robots will get one step closer. That's when a San Marcos company will unveil Harmony, an anatomically correct sex doll with a patented animatronic talking head with programmable personality and memory. News of creator Matt McMullen's latest invention -- he's been making lifelike silicone sex dolls for 20 years -- has created international media interest and a firestorm of criticism from ethicists and futurists who see a dark side to a sex doll that becomes more "human" with each technological innovation. One critic worries that the doll's artificial intelligence app could be hacked to make it kill its owner (like the vengeance meted out by sex robots in the film "Ex Machina" and TV show "Westworld"). And women's advocates say owners could realistically rehearse plans for violent sexual acts with the interactive dolls.

After years of hearings, investigations, and states doing whatever they like in the absence of federal decision-making, self-driving car decrees flowed out of Washington, DC, this week like your data from Equifax. The Department of Transportation updated its policy on automated vehicles. The National Transportation Safety Board released the results of a yearlong investigation into a deadly Tesla Autopilot crash. The Senate took on self-driving trucks, with a hearing that pitted the industry against the truckers who ply the nation's highways. Transportation change is happening, and this country's policymakers finally seem ready to tackle it.

ISLAMABAD (AP) -- Two Pakistani officials say a suspected U.S. drone strike has targeted a compound in a northwestern tribal region along the Afghan border, killing three suspected militants. The officials said two suspects were also wounded in Friday's strike on a border village in the Kurram tribal region. If confirmed, it would be the first U.S. drone strike on Pakistan since President Donald Trump announced his new strategy for Afghanistan. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to brief media. The officials said apparently Afghan Taliban, including member Abdul Salam, were targeted but it was unclear whether they were present at the time.

"South Park" debuted its 21st season Wednesday and the long-running animated show mostly focused on Confederate flag protests in "White People Renovating Houses." But the show also took the opportunity to needle another group: viewers with smart home speakers. In the episode, Cartman issued various typical -- and slightly less typical -- commands to his on-screen Amazon Echo and Google Homer speakers and, in what was more than likely an intentional move, viewers' speakers followed suit. In other news I have an erroneous alarm set for 7am and a set of hairy balls on my shopping list. Voice home assistants like the Google Home and Amazon Echo have occasionally had problems with accidentally taking commands from TV broadcasts.

A robot hand with artificial skin reaches for a glass of ice water. Researchers at the University of Houston have created an artificial skin that allows a robotic hand to sense the difference between heat and cold. The research is the first to create a semiconductor with a rubber composite, which would allow it to still work when stretched by as much as 50%. The discovery of stretchable electronics could have a significant impact in the wearables market, with devices such as health monitors or biomedical devices, says Cunjiang Yu, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Houston and the lead author for the paper. When the stretchable electronic skin was applied to a robotic hand, it could tell the difference between hot and cold water.

When Gang Xu, a 46-year-old Beijing resident, needs to communicate with his Canadian tenant about rent payments or electricity bills, he opens an app called iFlytek Input in his smartphone and taps an icon that looks like a microphone, and then begins talking. The software turns his Chinese verbal messages into English text messages, and sends them to the Canadian tenant. In China, over 500 million people use iFlytek Input to overcome obstacles in communication such as the one Xu faces. Some also use it to send text messages through voice commands while driving, or to communicate with a speaker of another Chinese dialect. The app was developed by iFlytek, a Chinese AI company that applies deep learning in a range of fields such as speech recognition, natural-language processing, machine translation, and data mining (see "50 Smartest Companies 2017").

The effort points to ways in which Amazon and other companies could try to improve the tracking of trends in other areas of retail--making recommendations based on products popping up in social-media posts, for instance. For instance, one group of Amazon researchers based in Israel developed machine learning that, by analyzing just a few labels attached to images, can deduce whether a particular look can be considered stylish. An Amazon team at Lab126, a research center based in San Francisco, has developed an algorithm that learns about a particular style of fashion from images, and can then generate new items in similar styles from scratch--essentially, a simple AI fashion designer. The event included mostly academic researchers who are exploring ways for machines to understand fashion trends.

Michal Kosinski – the Stanford University professor who went viral last week for research suggesting that artificial intelligence (AI) can detect whether people are gay or straight based on photos – said sexual orientation was just one of many characteristics that algorithms would be able to predict through facial recognition. Kosinski, an assistant professor of organizational behavior, said he was studying links between facial features and political preferences, with preliminary results showing that AI is effective at guessing people's ideologies based on their faces. That means political leanings are possibly linked to genetics or developmental factors, which could result in detectable facial differences. Facial recognition may also be used to make inferences about IQ, said Kosinski, suggesting a future in which schools could use the results of facial scans when considering prospective students.

The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has found that Tesla's Autopilot system was partly to blame for a fatal accident in which a Model S collided with a lorry. Federal investigators say Tesla "lacked understanding" of the semi-autonomous Autopilot's limitations. The NTSB recommended that car manufacturers and regulators take steps to ensure such systems are not misused. It said the collision should never have happened. The crash, in May 2016, led to the death of Tesla driver Joshua Brown, 40.