Regarding Fear and Artificial Intelligence (AI), one question often comes up:'Will we be killed by a Terminator Doppelganger?' I don't know if this will happen eventually, but I do know that we already have robots fighting our wars. This century is therefore, the first time in human history that we engage in Unmanned Warfare. What is the current status of this'Unmanned Warfare'? What do people think about drone strikes and will terminators be the next step?

By KEITH FERNER-WE are on the cusp of a brave new world as technologies such as 3D printing, advanced robotics, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things reshape the workplace. Smart algorithms and machines are taking on more and more of the tasks that humans used to do on factory floors, in financial call centres and even in hospitality and retail. In manufacturing, we see the advent of Industry 4.0 – a fourth industrial revolution driven by connected devices and sensors, cloud computing, advanced robotics, intelligent software, and a range of other technologies. Companies like Tesla produce complex products in a smooth, automated process using specialist robots with very little human input. Autonomous driving vehicles that use computer vision are prowling the streets in pilot projects in many of the world's largest cities.

We are excited to announce our next MIIA event that will be hosted by PwC in V&A Waterfront, Cape Town on the 16th of August 2017 at 6pm. The theme of the event is "Data Science Applications to help businesses thrive in the Smart Technology Era" and we have speakers from PwC, Dimago, Cortex Logic and UCT. The Machine Intelligence Institute of Africa (MIIA) has also recently partnered with the Africa Data Forum and will be participating in the upcoming All Things Data Conference at the Westin, Cape Town on 29-30 August 2017. MIIA has decided to join forces with the Africa Data Science Association and will also have Board representation in this non profit organization that aims to ensure alignment between the academia and corporates on data science curriculum. We are excited to have many of the MIIA community members also participating in the upcoming Deep Learning Indaba at Wits, Johannesburg from 10-15 September 2017.

Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company's popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination. Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post.

We have been in touch with the Metropolitan Police Department; they told us that they are doing what they can to find those teens,

When bigwigs like Google and Amazon begin to use the services of a seemingly inconspicuous Indian startup, it may be time to sit up and take notice. Launched around eight years ago, it offers cloud-based communications solutions to businesses in emerging markets. "Our platform uses AI to provide advanced telephony services to businesses," says CEO and founder of Knowlarity, Ambarish Gupta. "It enables them to deliver highly personalised messages to their customers while cutting down overall costs," he added. Headquartered in Singapore, Knowlarity claims that over 15,000 businesses across India, South-east Asia and the Middle East are currently using its services.

Just a year ago, proposing a concept like universal basic income could practically get me laughed off the stage at a tech industry conference. The idea that everyone should be guaranteed a minimum subsidy from the government seemed to go against every fundamental tenet of creative destruction: Don't reward the obsolete! If workers lose their jobs to automation, retrain them for new ones! From the perspective of Silicon Valley's executives, only a hippie or communist would suggest that people be given a livable wage simply for being alive. But to me, having just published a book about the lopsided returns of the digital economy, universal basic income seemed an obvious solution to a problem first posed in the 1950s by the inventor of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener: What would happen when robots could till the fields, rendering human labor obsolete?

The comedian Dara Ó Briain has a funny routine about video games. He talks about how no other form of entertainment purposefully withholds content until it considers that you deserve to see it. There are no books that test you at the end of the chapter to ensure you have appreciated all the themes correctly; films don't end if you fail to spot a visual gag. But this is how most games work. Which makes reviewing a game a very different experience to reviewing a movie or a book.

In this July 17, 2017, photo, the Afghanistan team, left, walks past two of the team members from Burundi, at right in black shirts, during the FIRST Global Robotics Challenge in Washington. Police tweeted missing person fliers Wednesday asking for help finding the teens, who had last been seen at the FIRST Global Challenge around the time of Tuesday's final matches. The missing team members include two 17-year-old girls and four males ranging in age from 16 to 18. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) The Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Police have received reports that two of the Burundi teenagers listed as missing after an international robotics competition have been seen crossing the border into Canada. The whereabouts of their fellow team members remains unknown and the search for all the teens remains ongoing, but Metropolitan Police spokeswoman Aquita Brown stressed that police have no indication of foul play in their disappearance. The teens seen crossing into Canada were 16-year-old Don Ingabire and 17-year-old Audrey Mwamikazi, Brown said. Police tweeted missing person fliers Wednesday asking for help finding the teens, who had last been seen at the FIRST Global Challenge around the time of Tuesday's final matches. The missing team members include two 17-year-old girls and four males ranging in age from 16 to 18.