At least 21 such attacks have been leveled at Waymo vans in Chandler, as first reported by The Arizona Republic. Some analysts say they expect more such behavior as the nation moves into a broader discussion about the potential for driverless cars to unleash colossal changes in American society. "People are lashing out justifiably," said Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist at City University of New York and author of the book "Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus." He likened driverless cars to robotic incarnations of scabs -- workers who refuse to join strikes or who take the place of those on strike. "There's a growing sense that the giant corporations honing driverless technologies do not have our best interests at heart," Mr. Rushkoff said.

The UK government is investing millions in the development of micro-robots designed to work in underground pipe networks and dangerous sites such as decommissioned nuclear facilities. Airborne and underwater versions could also inspect and maintain difficult-to-reach locations such as offshore windfarms or oil and gas pressure vessels. Led by Prof Kirill Horoshenkov at the University of Sheffield and backed by a £7.2m government grant, the collaborative research programme will also involve scientists from Birmingham, Bristol and Leeds universities. It is hoped that the 1cm-long devices will use sensors and navigation systems to find and mend cracks in pipes, avoiding disruption from roadworks estimated to cost the economy £5bn a year. The remaining £19.4m will fund research into the use of robotics in hazardous environments, including drones for oil pipeline monitoring or artificial intelligence able to establish the need for repairs on satellites in orbit.

Computer scientist and professor Eugene Fiume talks about what science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov got right and wrong in his predictions of 2019.

CHELMSFORD, MASSACHUSETTS - The U.S. Army is looking for a few good robots. Not to fight -- not yet, at least -- but to help the men and women who do. These robots aren't taking up arms, but the companies making them have waged a different kind of battle. At stake is a contract worth almost half a billion dollars for 3,000 backpack-sized robots that can defuse bombs and scout enemy positions. Competition for the work has spilled over into Congress and federal court.

What jobs will AI probably not destroy? The jobs that are most susceptible to automation in the near term are those that are fundamentally routine or predictable in nature. If you have a boring job--where you come to work and do the same kinds of things again and again, you should probably worry. The tasks within jobs like this are likely to be encapsulated in the data that is collected by organizations. So it may only be a matter of time before a powerful machine learning algorithm comes along that can automate much of this work.

In early December, researchers at DeepMind, the artificial-intelligence company owned by Google's parent corporation, Alphabet Inc., filed a dispatch from the frontiers of chess. A year earlier, on Dec. 5, 2017, the team had stunned the chess world with its announcement of AlphaZero, a machine-learning algorithm that had mastered not only chess but shogi, or Japanese chess, and Go. The algorithm started with no knowledge of the games beyond their basic rules. It then played against itself millions of times and learned from its mistakes. In a matter of hours, the algorithm became the best player, human or computer, the world has ever seen.

Researchers at Stanford University engineers used a deep learning computer model to identify every solar panel in the continuous U.S. from satellite images. Stanford University engineers have developed a method for locating every solar panel in the contiguous U.S. from a massive satellite image database via a deep learning computer model. The researchers used a pre-trained model called Inception as the basis for the DeepSolar neural network's clustering and classifying of pixels in images. DeepSolar scanned more than 1 billion image "tiles," comprising areas bigger than a neighborhood but smaller than a zip code; each tile had 102,400 pixels, and DeepSolar classified each pixel in each tile, determining whether it was likely part of a solar panel or not. The network completed this task in less than a month, ascertaining that regions with more sun exposure had greater solar panel adoption than areas with less average sunlight.

In September of this year, Amazon hosted a press event in the steamy Spheres at its Seattle headquarters, announcing a dizzying array of new hardware products designed to work with the voice assistant Alexa. But at the event, Amazon also debuted some new capabilities for Alexa that showcased the ways in which the company has been trying to give its voice assistant what is essentially a better memory. At one point during the presentation, Amazon executive Dave Limp whispered a command to Alexa to play a lullaby. Voice-controlled virtual assistants like Alexa and the speakers they live inside are no longer a novelty; an estimated 100 million smart speakers were installed homes around the world in 2018. But this year, the companies making voice-controlled products tried to turn them into sentient gadgets.

The day after Christmas is always a good day to see which products and apps people were most excited about this holiday season. According to Wednesday's top free apps charts on Android's Google Play and iOS' iPhone, plenty of people received Google Home, Alexa-enabled speakers and Fitbits this holiday season. Amazon's Alexa app took the top spot on both app stores' lists of the top free apps midday Wednesday while Fitbit was in the No. 5 slot. Google Home took the No. 3 spot on the Android Play Store and came in seventh on iPhone. Since all three apps are needed to set up their respective devices, it's likely that many people received Amazon Echo or Google Home speakers, Chromecast streaming sticks and Fitbit trackers.

Well spare a thought for all those people in the world who share their name with the digital assistant.