Danish physicist Neils Bohr once quipped that prediction is hard, especially when it is about the future. But this is precisely what financial regulators need to do--forecasting the likely state of the economy in the future is crucial when deciding on policy levers like whether to slash or raise interest rates. However, as the world continues to become more unpredictable, forecasting has become increasingly difficult. This challenge was poignantly illustrated after the start of the 2008 Financial Crisis, when Queen Elizabeth asked a seemingly simple but pointed question to a room of researchers and economists at the London School of Economics: Why did no one see it coming? In the face of great complexity, perhaps econometrics could do with more help.

David Carbon, the vice president of Prime Air, said in a statement that the certification "indicates the F.A.A.'s confidence in Amazon's operating and safety procedures for an autonomous drone delivery service that will one day deliver around the world." He added that the company would "continue to develop and refine our technology to fully integrate delivery drones into the airspace, and work closely with the F.A.A. and other regulators around the world to realize our vision of 30-minute delivery." At a conference in Las Vegas last year, Amazon revealed a fully electric hexagonal drone that could carry up to five pounds. The drone had advanced spatial awareness technology that allowed it to avoid contact with other objects, the company said. Amazon already offers one-day delivery in many places, but shortening delivery times has long been a goal of the company's chief executive, Jeff Bezos.

In July 2019, Tesla's website advertised "full potential for autonomous driving" including automatic driving on motorways - although it has always maintained that its Autopilot is not designed to be a substitute for a human driver.

Those are just a few of the applications that Elon Musk and employees at his four-year-old neuroscience company Neuralink believe electronic brain-computer interfaces will one day bring about. None of these advances are close at hand, and some are unlikely to ever come about. But in a "product update" streamed over YouTube on Friday, Musk, also the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, joined staffers wearing black masks to discuss the company's work toward an affordable, reliable brain implant that Musk believes billions of consumers will clamor for in the future. "In a lot of ways," Musk said, "It's kind of like a Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires." Although the online event was described as a product demonstration, there is as yet nothing that anyone can buy or use from Neuralink.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed a contract with facial recognition company Clearview AI this week for "mission support," government contracting records show (as first spotted by the tech accountability nonprofit Tech Inquiry). The purchase order for $224,000 describes "clearview licenses" and lists "ICE mission support dallas" as the contracting office. ICE is known to use facial recognition technology; last month, The Washington Post reported the agency, along with the FBI, had accessed state drivers' license databases -- a veritable facial recognition gold mine, as the Post termed it -- but without the knowledge or consent of drivers. The agency has been criticized for its practices at the US southern border, which has included separating immigrant children from their families and detaining refugees indefinitely. "Clearview AI's agreement is with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which uses our technology for their Child Exploitation Unit and ongoing criminal investigations," Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That said in an emailed statement to The Verge.

The news: IBM has built a new chemistry lab called RoboRXN in the cloud. It combines AI models, a cloud computing platform, and robots to help scientists design and synthesize new molecules while working from home. How it works: The online lab platform allows scientists to log on through a web browser. On a blank canvas, they draw the skeletal structure of the molecular compounds they want to make, and the platform uses machine learning to predict the ingredients required and the order in which they should be mixed. It then sends the instructions to a robot in a remote lab to execute.

Facebook recently showed off the progress its AI research team has made in the realm of household robotics. The dream is to take the virtual assistant out of the speaker and put it into an autonomous body capable of traversing your house. To accomplish a task like checking to see whether you locked the front door or retrieving a cell phone that's ringing in an upstairs bedroom, AI assistants of the future must learn to plan their route, navigate effectively, look around their physical environment, listen to what's happening around them, and build memories of the 3D space. Facebook's created a new system called SoundSpaces that gives robots the ability to interpret sounds. Current virtual assistants merely listen for wake words and then use natural language processing to interpret verbal commands as triggers. While the microphone array technology behind some of these assistants is impressive, they're merely designed to pick up voices in noisy environments.

A troop of a million walking robots could enable scientific exploration at a microscopic level. Researchers have developed microscopic robots before, but they weren't able to move by themselves, says Marc Miskin at the University of Pennsylvania. That is partly because of a lack of micrometre-scale actuators – components required for movement, such as the bending of a robot's legs. Miskin and his colleagues overcame this by developing a new type of actuator made of an extremely thin layer of platinum. Each robot uses four of these tiny actuators as legs, connected to solar cells on its back that enable the legs to bend in response to laser light and propel their square metallic bodies forwards.

In 1959, Nobel laureate and nanotechnology visionary Richard Feynman suggested that it would be interesting to "swallow the surgeon" -- that is, to make a tiny robot that could travel through blood vessels to carry out surgery where needed. This iconic imagining of the future underscored modern hopes for the field of micrometre-scale robotics: to deploy autonomous devices in environments that their macroscopic counterparts cannot reach. However, the construction of such robots presents several challenges, including the obvious difficulty of how to assemble a microscopic locomotive device. In a paper in Nature, Miskin et al.1 report electrochemically driven devices that propel laser-controlled microrobots through a liquid, and which could be easily integrated with microelectronics components to construct fully autonomous microrobots. Designing propulsion strategies for microrobots that move through liquid environments is challenging because strong drag forces prevent microscale objects from maintaining momentum2.