A self-driving car powered by one of the more popular artificial intelligence techniques may need to crash into a tree 50,000 times in virtual simulations before learning that it's a bad idea. But baby wild goats scrambling around on incredibly steep mountainsides do not have the luxury of living and dying millions of times before learning how to climb with sure footing without falling to their deaths. And a psychologist's 3-year-old daughter did not need to practice millions of times before she figured out, upon a whim, how to climb through an opening in the back of a chair. Today's most powerful AI techniques learn almost everything about the world from scratch with the help of powerful computational resources. By comparison, humans and animals seem to intuitively understand certain concepts--objects and places and sets of related things--that allow them to quickly learn about how the world works. That begs an important "nature vs. nurture" question: Will AI learning require built-in versions of that innate cognitive machinery possessed by humans and animals to achieve a similar level of general intelligence?

The following feature is excerpted from TIME Artificial Intelligence: The Future of Humankind, available at retailers and at the Time Shop and Amazon. Medicine is both art and science. While any doctor will quickly credit her rigorous medical training in the nuts and bolts of how the human body works, she will just as adamantly school you on how virtually all of the decisions she makes--about how to diagnose disease and how best to treat it--are equally the product of some less tangible measures: her experience from previous patients; her cumulative years of watching and learning from patients, colleagues and the human body. Which is why the idea of introducing machines into medicine seems misguided at the very least, and also foolhardy. How can a robot, no matter how well-trained, take the place of a doctor?

Stefano Domenicali has abandoned his uniform. This is a man who, based on his public appearances, lives in suits worth more than your car. He is, after all, the CEO of Lamborghini. Any element of his appearance that doesn't live up to the combination of wealth, style, and Italian-ness that his company represents would be an offense. Today he's wearing the suit, but has left the collar of his perfectly pressed shirt unbuttoned. He chose the casual look, he says, out of deference to the aggressively lenient sartorial sense of Silicon Valley.

Uber drivers could one day be spared from engaging in small talk with drunks if a National Transport Commission suggestion to allow people under the influence of alcohol to use fully automated vehicles is adopted by state road authorities. The NTC, an independent statutory body tasked with reforming Australia's driving laws to prepare for the arrival of driverless cars, has recommended an "exemption" from drink and drug-driving laws for people who ride in fully automated vehicles. In a new discussion paper it argues there is a "clear-cut" justification for an exemption from drink-driving laws because there is "no possibility that a human could drive a dedicated automated vehicle". "The situation is analogous to a person instructing a taxi driver where to go," the NTC report states. State traffic laws prohibit driving under the influence of varying levels of alcohol but the NTC says they could be a "barrier" to the benefits of driverless vehicles, which it argues could improve road safety by reducing the incidence of drink-driving.

Silicon Valley celebrates artificial intelligence and robotics as fields that have the power to improve people's lives, through inventions like driverless cars and robot carers for the elderly. That message isn't getting through to the rest of the country, where more than 70% of Americans express wariness or concern about a world where machines perform many of the tasks done by humans, according to Pew Research. The findings have wide-reaching implications for technology companies working in these fields and indicates the need for greater public hand-holding. "Ordinary Americans are very wary and concerned about the growing trend in automation and place a lot of value in human decision-making," said Aaron Smith, the author of the research, which surveyed more than 4,000 US adults. "They are not incredibly excited about machines taking over those responsibilities."

The market for devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home is so new that nobody really knows anything, except that smart speakers are fun as hell and they're probably important to the connected future of everything. We're firmly in the spaghetti-throwing phase of the technology, as companies experiment in public to find out what works. Barely a week after Amazon unveiled a half-dozen new Echo products, Google has a new smart speaker of its own. It's called the Google Home Mini, and it's just like the Google Home, but miniaturized. The $49 smart speaker looks like a mesh-wrapped pebble, and comes in three colors: gray, dark gray, and coral. The Home Mini is Google's equivalent to the Echo Dot: It has all the same features, only with a worse speaker and a smaller body.

Hot-air balloon pilot Richard Varney typically spends his weekends transporting tourists around central Massachusetts in a huge, multicolored balloon. But on a recent Sunday, Varney drove to a local community college and learned to fly a different type of aerial vehicle. "I want to try something new," he said as he watched an instructor demonstrate how to steer a $2,000 drone equipped with a camera. "This could help me launch a side business taking aerial photos of local towns." At least 15 community colleges across the country now have courses that teach people how to pilot drones, according to research conducted by MIT Technology Review.

One: Did former Google engineer and self–driving car whiz Anthony Levandowski swipe documents containing valuable Google intellectual property and bring them to his own startup, which would be acquired by Uber just months later for a reported $680 million? And two: Did Uber executives, including now-ousted CEO Travis Kalanick, conspire with Levandowski to do it, then use that IP to advance their own technology? Now, a hotly contested due diligence report, commissioned by Uber, makes it clear that the ride-hailing company knew Levandowski had ill-gotten Google files before it bought his startup and put him in charge of its own self-driving efforts. Question one seems to have its answer, and question two just got a lot more interesting. The firm Stroz Friedberg prepared the report, which Uber used to prepare for its 2016 acquisition of Otto, Levandowski's company focused on self–driving truck technology. Waymo's attorneys filed the report as an exhibit in the case Monday night, making it public.

Listen, you're kinda spooked about the rise of artificial intelligence, and I get that. It's a tremendously powerful technology that promises to transform the very nature of work, inevitably leading to the automation of certain white-collar jobs. But AI also promises to make human labor smarter and more efficient, even something as traditional as small-scale farming. To that end, researchers have developed a smartphone-based program that can automatically detect diseases in the cassava plant--the most widely grown root crop on Earth--with darn near 100 percent accuracy. The most impressive bit about the technology is that the neural network that powers it runs entirely on the smartphone, no cloud computing or hulking processors required, as the researchers detail in a preprint paper to be published in Frontiers in Plant Science.

With the crisis in Puerto Rico unfolding--and expanding--daily in the wake of Hurricane Maria, the scale of the devastation is coming into horrifying focus. It's not just that the American territory has been, by many accounts, "destroyed." "We are dying here," San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Crus said Friday. Getting food, water, and medicine to and throughout Puerto Rico is a "logistical nightmare," former FEMA boss Michael Brown told CNBC. Which brings up the question: Where are the drones that could pick up the slack?