Jobs are disappearing, incomes retreating, the precariat growing. Thousands of people risk their lives in stormy seas to flee wars, moribund economies and climate change on a daily basis. Traditional politicians continue to avoid publicly addressing the tsunami of unemployment, apparently baffled as to how to react to a historic transition: the automation of critical masses of labour once performed by humans. Five acronyms - AI, AR, VR, BC and UBI - promise to shape the developed world's future and solve the problems of the present. In the process, however, these innovations risk transforming the world around us, and upsetting humanity's very definition of itself.

Sweden's answer to the F-35 has taken its maiden flight, maker Saab has revealed. During the 40-minute flight over the eastern parts of Östergötland, the latest Gripen executed a series of maneuvers to test its systems, including extending and retracting its landing gear. The Gripen E'Smart Fighter' is aimed at markets not yet cleared to buy the troubled Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The latest version of the Gripen fighter jet has been unveiled by Swedish aircraft maker, Saab. The Gripen E 39-8 prototype has a 15.2 metre (50ft) long body and a wingspan of 8.6 metres (28ft).

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. I suppose you could decide that this project from MIT's Tangible Media Group isn't really a robot, but I think it's arguably robotic enough (and definitely cool enough) that we can let it slide for this week: We present AnimaStage: a hands-on animated craft platform based on an actuated stage. Utilizing a pin-based shape display, users can animate their crafts made from various materials.

The Darren Aronofsky film Pi features a mathematician with the uncanny ability to perform complex arithmetic in his head. Notwithstanding his talent, he uses a computer to make stock predictions. In one scene, after recognizing a predictive pattern in a 216-digit output, the character becomes so overwhelmed that he passes out. This scenario is science fiction, but computers have long had greater processing power than humans. When used to build artificial intelligence (AI), as its datasets grow, so does a computer's advantage.

Previously, I had started this conversation with the saying "I am not a Geek, but I need a job too…". Here is why: Technological anxiety (oh yes, it is a thing). I don't want to be a victim of the inevitable wave of "robots taking over our jobs" which is a simplistic explanation for the impact of advancements in technology in the workplace. The idea that half of today's jobs may vanish has changed my view of my children's future. Quincy Larson, Teacher at FreeCodeCamp (an open-source community that helps you learn to code, build pro bono projects for nonprofits, and get a job as a developer) has not stopped in his attempt to get more people coding.

For most gamers, early June is a kind of video-game Christmas. Summer brings E3 and its associated press conferences with the biggest names in publishing and development telling us what games and consoles to expect in the coming year. For the most part, audiences are shown cinematic trailer after cinematic trailer of grizzled white men brandishing guns on missions they've "just gotta take alone" introduced by white dudes in a blazer/T-shirt/jeans/trainers combo. Some shows manage to do better than others in offering audiences diverse games, and diverse speakers. Last year, we looked at how things stacked up in our diversity report.

Machine learning is going to fundamentally alter our world for the better, improving healthcare, the manufacturing industry and assisting in the prediction of supply and demand levels across a plethora of industries. For those who are into science fiction, the term'machine learning' immediately conjures up images of computers taking over the world, either to send murderous terminators from the future to our present or to place us all inside the Matrix as living power batteries. Fortunately, the truth about machine learning is not only far more prosaic, but also much more promising for the future of the human race. Basically, machine learning uses algorithms that iteratively learn from data, meaning that it enables computers to find hidden insights without being explicitly programmed where to look. The iterative aspect is especially important, as it means that as the computer is exposed to new data, it is able to independently adapt.

"Imagine a future anthropologist with access to trillions of photos of people--taken over centuries and across the world--and equipped with effective tools for analyzing these photos to derive insights. What kinds of new questions can be answered?" This is the dream that has inspired Kevin Matzen, Kavita Bala, and Noah Snavely at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Their thinking is that the millions of photos uploaded each day to social media provide a fascinating window into the cultural, social, and economic factors that shape societies around the world. With powerful enough machine intelligence, they say, it ought to be possible to mine this mother lode of data for deep insights into our civilization.

Let's do a quick exercise. Did you start at the top or bottom? New data show that the way you draw a circle holds clues about where you come from. In November, Google released an online game called Quick, Draw!, in which users have 20 seconds to draw prompts like "camel" and "washing machine." It's fun, but the game's real aim is to use those sketches to teach algorithms how humans draw.

Microsoft gave us the first glimpse of the upcoming Assassin's Creed during its Xbox One X reveal at E3. A day later, Ubisoft discussed the details about how it took a year off from the franchise to "reinvent" the game. Well, after spending some time playing on that newly announced console, what Ubisoft is showing off this week isn't a huge revelation, it's a continuation. There's no need to dance around the obvious: Assassin's Creed Origins looks amazing in 4K. You've heard us say that a lot this week about games on the Xbox One X, but the visuals really are stunning.