The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Hephaestus, the Greek god of blacksmiths, metalworking and carpenters, was said to have fashioned artificial beings in the form of golden robots. Myth finally moved toward truth in the 20th century, as AI developed in series of fits and starts, finally gaining major momentum--and reaching a tipping point--by the turn of the millennium. Here's how the modern history of AI and ML unfolded, starting in the years just following World War II. In 1950, while working at the University of Manchester, legendary code breaker Alan Turing (subject of the 2014 movie The Imitation Game) released a paper titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." It became famous for positing what became known as the "Turing test."

High altitude searches are a risky business. So let us introduce the hero of our story, the DJI Mavic Pro drone.

The Lincoln Journal Star reports that the city is testing a "self-driving micro-transit system" with a $100,000 grant awarded by Bloomberg Philanthropies for participating in its 2018 Mayors Challenge.

San Francisco has some of the country's worst traffic. The lights always feel out of sync. The pavement is riddled with potholes. It is, in all, a horrific place to drive. And for the same reasons, it's a tremendous place to teach a car to drive itself.

When Google Translate converts news articles written in Spanish into English, phrases referring to women often become'he said' or'he wrote'. Software designed to warn people using Nikon cameras when the person they are photographing seems to be blinking tends to interpret Asians as always blinking. Word embedding, a popular algorithm used to process and analyse large amounts of natural-language data, characterizes European American names as pleasant and African American ones as unpleasant. These are just a few of the many examples uncovered so far of artificial intelligence (AI) applications systematically discriminating against specific populations. Biased decision-making is hardly unique to AI, but as many researchers have noted1, the growing scope of AI makes it particularly important to address.

The deep sea is a challenging place to study wildlife, but a new foldable robotic grabber may make capturing underwater creatures a bit easier. Many deep sea animals, such as jellyfish and their relatives, have fragile bodies. This means catching them using suction or claw-like grabbers, can cause them to break apart, leaving broken pieces to study instead of whole organisms. To counteract this, Zhi Ern Teoh at Harvard University in Massachusetts and colleagues created a robotic grabber based on a regular dodecahedron – a 3D shape built from 12 pentagons. The grabber is used by attaching it to a remote controlled underwater vehicle or another type of submersible.

With all the excitement over neural networks and deep-learning techniques, it's easy to imagine that the world of computer science consists of little else. Neural networks, after all, have begun to outperform humans in tasks such as object and face recognition and in games such as chess, Go, and various arcade video games. These networks are based on the way the human brain works. Nothing could have more potential than that, right? An entirely different type of computing has the potential to be significantly more powerful than neural networks and deep learning.

Waldo Photos uses facial recognition technology to identify children at sleep-away camp and send photos of them to their parents. But some privacy advocates say this technology is too new to rush into.