Just before the launch of Football Manager 2017 [official site], with the beta already released to the many people who preordered the game, I spoke to Sports Interactive director Miles Jacobson about the changes his team have made in this latest game in the series. We talked about AI improvements, Brexit, and whether Leicester winning the Premier League was a happy day or a sad day at Sports Interactive. With updates to the beta arriving regularly as the people playing provided feedback, commentary and complaints, Sports Interactive is a busy place around this time of year. The fortnight before launch day is an enormous playtest, in which more eyes are on the new version of the game than have been at any point during development. Jacobson seems happy to take time away from assessment of new release candidate builds to talk though.

Liberia has lost access to the entire internet in apparent preparation for shutting down the entire internet. Repeated attacks are flooding the country's network with requests and taking it down entirely. That has intermittently knocked the entire web offline, meaning that people can't access any websites or web services. The attacks appear to be a way for hackers to test a variety of ways of attacking internet connections and taking offline. In that way they resemble the attacks launched recently, when hackers brought down many of the world's biggest websites.

The number one goal in United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 is: eliminate poverty. Today, around 1 billion people, that's roughly one seventh of the world's population, live in extreme poverty by earning less than 1.90$ per day. Though studies reveal that global poverty is reducing, we are still a long way from our goal. To eradicate poverty, we first need the poverty distribution across the globe. The following diagram gives a rough estimate.

Huawei's slice of the worldwide mobile pie isn't as big as it used to be, but hey -- at least it keeps getting better at making big phones. We didn't know it would be the last Nexus phone, but the 6P was a solid sendoff. Then came the enormous Mate 8, which was incredibly well built (even if the company's EMUI interface sometimes made me want to jam a fork in my eye). With the new Mate 9, however, Huawei is trying to do things a little differently. Case in point: the phone will eventually launch in the US, a first for the company's flagship phablets.

The Snasci Logo comprises of three smaller rings, intersected by a large ring. Symbolically, this represents an adaptation of the Three Laws of Robotics by the science fiction author Isaac Asimov. The rules first appeared in his short story "Runaround" (1942). Quoting from the "Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.", the laws are: Whilst these laws are broadly acceptable for a robot, they are too narrow for an Artificial General Intelligence. An artificial General Intelligence must deal with scenarios that go beyond physical interaction with humans.

Emerging technology may help wildlife officials beat back traffickers. Antipoaching patrols like this team at the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya may soon use AI technology to stay one step ahead of criminals. Poachers kill an estimated 96 African elephants every day, causing conservationists to warn that the iconic animals could disappear in our lifetime if the tide doesn't turn. But now scientists hope a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool could help wildlife officials get a leg up against poachers. PAWS, which stands for Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security, is a newly developed AI that takes data about previous poaching activities and outputs routes for patrols based on where poaching is likely to occur.

They're not driven by the unknown, but by the present. Let's look at the last epoch-changing technological development: the internet. The tech utopians of the late 20th century saw the incoming digital revolution as a liberating force, one that would dismantle the old power structures that oppress us and help humanity build a new, more perfect society. It's painfully clear now that their hypothesis was laughably naive. Who, exactly, has the internet liberated? Silicon Valley tech tycoons and advertisers aside, it has decimated the music, film and publishing industries, slashed the earnings of musicians, writers, photographers, and just about every other professional whose product can be digitized, shrinking their industries, killing off job openings, and maiming job security.

"What is it like to be a bat?" the philosopher Thomas Nagel wondered in 1974. But something essential about the experience was off limits to his imagination. "I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task." Nagel's famous essay considered a sticky problem: what is the relationship between our body and our mind? The question of what it's like to be someone, or something, else, has continued to tantalise. Now, research into making telerobotics happen may offer a weird and cool possibility – that of beginning to understand, if only a little, the experience of entities that are not at all like us.

Hollywood gets A.I. all wrong. Silver screen depictions often feature a robot impersonating a human, a prospect that's about as likely, and about as abused in screenwriting, as discovering humanoid extraterrestrial life. That's why I found Lucas Carlson's new technothriller novel, Big Data, so refreshing. Carlson combines an engineer's view on the future of A.I. with a cast of characters that can't stop until the dark secret brooding at the heart of the tale is revealed. It's a perfect summer read that you'll burn through in a day or two, and will leave you with a disturbing vision of what tomorrow might look like.

A young elephant was saved from drowning in a manmade structure in a Zimbabwe national park by a team that is using drones to deter poaching. An anti-poaching team saved a young elephant from drowning this month, and it was caught on video. The rescue was made by the Air Shepherd team in Zimbabwe's vast Hwange National Park. Air Shepherd is a partnership between the Lindbergh Foundation and the company UAV and Drone Solutions, which is working to deter poachers in Hwange and other parks around Africa. During an early morning scouting mission, Air Shepherd drone pilots Tom Lautenbach and Gift Kgadima were driving in Hwange, getting a feel for the land that they have been flying their drones over for the past few weeks.