Britain may be about to spend just over £800 million ($1 billion) on 26 Predator drones. The deadly drone, with a 79 feet (24 metres) wingspan, can fly for 40 hours at a time, carrying two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles or other munitions. If the deal goes through, 26 Predator unmanned aircraft will be built as early as 2018. Britain is looking to spend £803.92 million (1 billion US dollars) on American Predator drones (pictured), equipment and training. The Predator was first conceived in the early 1990s as an aerial reconnaissance vehicle, and carries cameras and other sensors.

Investors believe it is'inevitable' that artificial intelligence will destroy millions of jobs and that governments are unprepared for such an impact, according to a new survey. Artificial intelligence (AI), or the process by which computers or robots take on tasks that need human intelligence, is one of the key themes of this week's Web Summit in Lisbon. The poll among 224 venture capitalists attending the conference showed 53 percent believed AI would destroy millions of jobs and 93 percent saw governments as unprepared for this. The poll among 224 venture capitalists attending the Web summit in Lisbon found 53 percent believed AI would destroy millions of jobs and 93 percent saw governments as unprepared for this. The survey also found that 83 percent of the investors canvassed expect Britain's exit from the European Union to damage Europe's economy and 77 percent believe it will damage British startups.

An autonomous race car called'DevBot #1', has made its debut on a street track at the Formula E Marrakech ePrix. The battery-powered prototype is being tested ahead of Roborace – a proposed race series where autonomous vehicles will compete on circuits in cities around the world. The car completed a successful 30-minute test in the Moroccan city, which its creators describe as'the most exciting space in the world right now.' An autonomous race car called'DevBot #1', has made its debut on a street track at the Formula E Marrakech ePrix Ten teams, each with two driverless cars, will compete in one-hour races over the full championship season. All the teams will have the same cars, but will create their own real-time computing algorithms and AI technologies.

Retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn gestures as he arrives at Trump Tower, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2016, in New York. Retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn gestures as he arrives at Trump Tower, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2016, in New York. FILE- In this file photo taken on Thursday, Dec. 10, 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin, center right, with retired U.S. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, center left, and Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, obscured second right, attend an exhibition marking the 10th anniversary of RT (Russia Today) 24-hour English-language TV news channel in Moscow, Russia. Flynn is widely reported Thursday Nov. 17, 2016, to be a potential contender to become national security advisor to U.S. president elect Donald Trump, although his appointment may be controversial. Retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn walks through the lobby at Trump Tower, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2016, in New York.

Jeff Kavanaugh is VP and Managing Partner, High-Tech & Manufacturing at Infosys Consulting. Farming is, by far, the most mature industry mankind has created. Dating back to the dawn of civilization, farming has been refined, adjusted and adapted -- but never perfected. We, as a society, always worry over the future of farming. Today, we even apply terms usually reserved for the tech sector -- digital, IoT, AI and so on.

Jeff Kavanaugh is VP and Managing Partner, High-Tech & Manufacturing at Infosys Consulting. Farming is, by far, the most mature industry mankind has created. Dating back to the dawn of civilization, farming has been refined, adjusted and adapted -- but never perfected. We, as a society, always worry over the future of farming. Today, we even apply terms usually reserved for the tech sector -- digital, IoT, AI and so on.

That's how Hassan Yakub, al-Shabab's most senior leader in Somalia's Galgaduud region, responded when I requested that we use a drone to film his fighters at one of the armed group's training camps. Over the past few years, drone strikes have killed dozens of al-Shabab fighters, including the group's former leader and at least 10 of its senior commanders. The last drone hit to target the al-Qaeda-linked group's leaders happened just a month ago, in the East African country's Lower Juba region. Al-Shabab fighters have been trained to hide from drones or, if the unmanned aircraft are low enough, to shoot them down. Our cameraman was also not enthusiastic about taking a drone to an area controlled by al-Shabab.

The BBC is launching 11 new language services and one of them is English-based Pidgin, which is one of the most widely spoken languages across West Africa, even though it is not officially recognised. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of Pidgin is: A language containing lexical and other features from two or more languages, characteristically with simplified grammar and a smaller vocabulary than the languages from which it is derived, used for communication between people not having a common language; a lingua franca. Simply put, Pidgin English is a mixture of English and local languages which enables people who do not share a common language to communicate. Most African countries are made up of numerous different ethnic groups who do not necessarily have a lingua franca, so Pidgin has developed. It is widely spoken in Nigeria, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon.

Facebook's Connectivity Lab today released its high-resolution population maps for Malawi, South Africa, Ghana, Haiti and Sri Lanka, with the promise to make more datasets available over the coming months. The population maps are a joint effort between the Facebook Connectivity Lab, Columbia University and the World Bank, though Facebook is interested in the project as part of its effort to launch wireless communication services in rural regions around the globe. Facebook and friends used software to identify buildings in commercially available satellite images, and then estimated population using census data and a few other surveys and programs. Convolutional neural networks powered a model capable of identifying individual buildings in images from across the world. "There has been a lot of work recently on neural networks that can recognize individual buildings with very high accuracy, but these models are finely tuned on the local characteristics of the region where they are trained," the Connectivity Lab's Tobias Tiecke writes. "We found that these models do not perform well at a global scale with realistic amounts of training data.

UNITED NATIONS – U.N. member states on Tuesday condemned widespread human rights violations in North Korea and expressed concerns that funds needed to ease the dire humanitarian crisis are spent on Pyongyang's missile and nuclear arms programs. A resolution drafted by Japan and the European Union was adopted by a consensus vote in the General Assembly's committee on humanitarian affairs. Following the vote, diplomats from China, Pyongyang's ally, Russia, Syria, Iran and Cuba took the floor to state they were disassociating themselves from the outcome. The full General Assembly is expected to vote on the measure next month. North Korea has conducted two nuclear tests this year and test-fired a series of missiles, even as 18 million North Koreans out of a total population of 25 million are facing food shortages, Japan's ambassador said. "The authorities of the DPRK (North Korea), without regard to the plight of their own citizens, divert their limited resources to develop weapons of mass destruction," said Ambassador Koro Bessho.