Of all the prejudices of pundits, presentism is the strongest. It is the assumption that what is happening now is going to keep on happening, without anything happening to stop it. If the West has broken down the Berlin Wall and McDonald's opens in St. Petersburg, then history is over and Thomas Friedman is content. If, by a margin so small that in a voice vote you would have no idea who won, Brexit happens; or if, by a trick of an antique electoral system designed to give country people more power than city people, a Donald Trump is elected, then pluralist constitutional democracy is finished. The liberal millennium was upon us as the year 2000 dawned; fifteen years later, the autocratic apocalypse is at hand. You would think that people who think for a living would pause and reflect that whatever is happening usually does stop happening, and something else happens in its place; a baby who is crying now will stop crying sooner or later. Exhaustion, or a change of mood, or a passing sound, or a bright light, something, always happens next. But for the parents the wait can feel the same as forever, and for many pundits, too, now is the only time worth knowing, for now is when the baby is crying and now is when they're selling your books.

Will Roper plays video games like the future of the country depends on it, because, well, it kind of does. As director of the Pentagon's Strategic Capabilities Office, Roper spends his days predicting how war will work in the not-so-distant future, and developing the technological capabilities that will enable the American military to lead the way. Because Silicon Valley's companies evolve so much faster than the bureaucracies of Washington can, Roper and the SCO draw inspiration from the private sector picking apart the genius of Pokémon Go. "I think they've solved one of the toughest challenges for warfare," Roper said of the app in a conversation with WIRED's Nick Thompson at South by Southwest Monday. "How do you take amazingly complex information and make it so integrated with the person interacting with it?" Roper envisions a day when soldiers will be able to drop a digital marker on the battlefield that future deployments and faraway units could also see, similar to how Pokémon Go enables millions of strangers to spot the same Jigglypuff in the middle of Times Square.

Our social media guy David Dhannoo remains in Africa, following on from his article last week about the rise of FinTech on the continent. Dave's technology in Africa series now looks at how a startup in Southern Africa is using artificial intelligence to source news articles. Controvert Media from Zimbabwe has implemented the use of artificial intelligence to automatically write and post news articles. They caught my attention from when they trialled their AI idea at the recent African Cup of Nations which took place Gabon. The startup used an AI bot that puts together basic reports on final match reports, taking into account the match scores, player performance data, and so on.

As artificial intelligence becomes more powerful, people need to make sure it's not used by authoritarian regimes to centralize power and target certain populations, Microsoft Research's Kate Crawford warned on Sunday. In her SXSW session, titled Dark Days: AI and the Rise of Fascism, Crawford, who studies the social impact of machine learning and large-scale data systems, explained ways that automated systems and their encoded biases can be misused, particularly when they fall into the wrong hands. "Just as we are seeing a step function increase in the spread of AI, something else is happening: the rise of ultra-nationalism, rightwing authoritarianism and fascism," she said. All of these movements have shared characteristics, including the desire to centralize power, track populations, demonize outsiders and claim authority and neutrality without being accountable. Machine intelligence can be a powerful part of the power playbook, she said.

Whenever i think about the impact that deep learning will have in Africa in the next 5–10 years from now, My curiosity and passion to understand and implements deep learning increases. Improving Agriculture yields in Africa with deep learning becomes my first focus. As a result of these reasons, it is now possible for anyone to apply deep learning techniques to real problems in a way that is both affordable and fast.

The matrix of anatomy, pathology and image observations on multiple modalities is huge. The supervised learning algorithms are hampered by the lack of annotated data sets for each cell in that matrix. The unsupervised learning methods will be hampered by the few examples of many of the rare cells of the matrix. Algorithms are typically developed one by one, i.e., this image observation in this disease setting (possibly in this population). Even after an algorithm is developed, it has to be'perfected' to high sensitivity and specificity because humans are very good at this task.

One of the best parts of writing the Afternoon Edition each day is that I get to explore all kinds of interesting topics. Two of those recent topics continue to be all over the news, and they are the issues of robots and automation, and artificial intelligence and the "Singularity." These topics do materially affect markets, although their effect may not be as acute as, say, a monthly employment report. And speaking of which, we got a new monthly employment report this morning, as February saw 235,000 new non-farm payroll jobs created. That's good economic news; however, I wonder how many more jobs would have been created if there weren't as many advancements in the field of automation.

Will humans still drive in the future? I was recently asked to join the debate over at 2025AD, a blog focused on the year many have claimed will be the watershed for the arrival of self-driving cars. I'm pessimistic, but convinced there is a silver lining. Journalist John McElroy, with whom I disagree bigly. I'm of two minds on whether people will still drive.

Fintech startups looking to disrupt payday lending are using artificial intelligence to make loans with rates as low as 6% and with default rates of 7% or less. AI can make a difference on several fronts, the startups say. It can process enormous amounts of data that traditional analytics programs can't handle, including data scraped constantly off the borrower's phone. It can find patterns of creditworthiness or lack thereof on its own, without having to be told of every clue and correlation, startups like Branch.co And the cost savings of eliminating the need for loan officers lets these companies make the loans at a profit.

The line for the SXSW panel'Eyes in the Sky: The Future of AI and Satellites' snaked around many corners in Austin's JW Marriot Hotel – understandably, AI coupled with space shit, bring it on. Spaceknow Inc's CEO Pavel Machalek did most of the talking during this session. Spaceknow is a San Francisco based company building an AI system that can process the petabytes of data from the hundreds of commercial satellites circling us up above. Gary Vaynerchuk was so impressed with TNW Conference 2016 he paused mid-talk to applaud us. "We are digitizing the physical world, so we can build apps on top it," Machalek stated. According to the Czech CEO, we're currently going through a sea of change in how we use satellite data.