One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction. Ex Machina, a Hollywood blockbuster made on a 15 million budget, tells the story of a programmer who is invited by his employer, the eccentric billionaire Nathan Bateman who built a fictional search engine called Blue Book, to administer the Turing test to an android with artificial intelligence, which essentially determines whether a computer can trick a human into believing she is having a conversation with another human. Everything in our online life is indexed. Every idle tweet, status update, or curious search query feeds the Google database.

Three military veterans once involved in the U.S. drone program have thrown their support behind a Yemeni man's legal fight to obtain details about why his family members were killed in a 2012 strike. The former soldiers' unusual decision to publicly endorse the lawsuit against President Obama and other U.S. officials adds another twist to Faisal bin Ali Jaber's four-year quest for accountability in the deaths of his brother-in-law and nephew, who he believes needlessly fell victim to one of the most lethal covert programs in U.S. history. The former enlisted service members told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a recent filing that they believe the 2012 drone strike serves as a case study of how mistakes frequently occur in the nation's targeted-killing program, where life-or-death decisions are based upon top-secret evidence. The veterans say they "witnessed a secret, global system without regard for borders, conducting widespread surveillance with the ability to conduct deadly targeted killing operations." Though the veterans did not disclose any personal knowledge of the strike that is alleged to have killed Jaber's relatives, they claim the military frequently labels the deaths of unknown victims as "enemy kills."

Since 1990, extreme poverty has been cut in half worldwide. But there are still more than 700 million people living on less than two dollars a day around the globe. The United Nations has made the elimination of poverty number one on its list of 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, a challenge that may sound impossible but that a team of Stanford University researchers believe could actually be well within reach. That's because they've come up with a cost-effective method of getting over one of the most difficult, if not most obvious, hurdles toward reaching that goal on time. "Poverty is this big problem that everybody wants to solve, but you can't even begin to work on it if you don't know where the poor are," said Neal Jean, a doctoral student and lead author of the Stanford research.

On a summer day in 1968, professor Julian Stanley met a brilliant but bored 12-year-old named Joseph Bates. The Baltimore student was so far ahead of his classmates in mathematics that his parents had arranged for him to take a computer-science course at Johns Hopkins University, where Stanley taught. Having leapfrogged ahead of the adults in the class, the child kept himself busy by teaching the FORTRAN programming language to graduate students. Unsure of what to do with Bates, his computer instructor introduced him to Stanley, a researcher well known for his work in psychometrics--the study of cognitive performance. To discover more about the young prodigy's talent, Stanley gave Bates a battery of tests that included the SAT college-admissions exam, normally taken by university-bound 16- to 18-year-olds in the United States.

In the IT world it is very important to get things exactly right, unless of course you are dealing with fuzzy logic. If your banking system, for example, is out by a decimal place, this can lead to some very unhappy customers or some very happy ones and a less than happy bank. There are many areas where calculations and units of measure are vital, just ask one of the Mars exploration landing teams. Not so obvious are making sure that things like translation services are accurate, as Microsoft found out recently. The Bing search engine saw some very red-faced Redmondites when Saudi Arabian users found that "Daesh" has been translated as "Saudi Arabia". For those not familiar with the term, Daesh is one name for Isis.

In H. G. Wells's classic The War of the Worlds, the narrator pauses a moment to rue the fact that he didn't react sooner to the arrival of an "intelligence greater than man's"--in his case, Martians landing on earth. Comparing himself to a comfortable dodo in its nest, he imagined those ill-fated birds also dithering as hungry sailors invaded their island: "We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear." As intelligent technologies take over more and more of the decision-making territory once occupied by humans, are you taking any action? Are you sufficiently aware of the signs that you should? To help you get the head start you may need, here are the signs that it's time to fly the nest.

Before Chris White could help disrupt Jihadi finance networks, crush weapons markets, and bust up sex-slave rings with search tools that mine the dark Web, he first had to figure out how to stop himself from plummeting through the open gun door of a banking Black Hawk helicopter. White was on his way to a forward operating base outside Kabul headquarters, as part of a secret intelligence cell to help confront the Taliban and al-Qaida, smash their encrypted online money stream, and win over the hearts and minds of the Afghanistan population. Slight and lanky and 28, White felt Dukakis-ridiculous in his unwieldy body armor and bulbous helmet with "Dr. White" scrawled in marker on duct tape across the front, and with the dust from liftoff, he was finding it hard to breathe. He was still struggling with the unfamiliar seat straps when the pilot hit the stick, sending White sliding toward the hot square of the door and the desert 200 feet below. Down there, Afghanistan was a messy, dangerous place for pretty much everybody. After nearly a decade of U.S.-led war, the American body count had hit 1,000, and civilian casualties were beyond calculation, as President Obama's 30,000-troop surge intensified the fighting that spring. Many feared the situation was only going from bad to worse. The U.S. was escalating drone strikes across the border in Pakistan. And U.S. command was under assault after Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the surge's architect, found himself without a job after he and his staff made disparaging remarks about the commander in chief in some music magazine. It is hard to imagine that only a few weeks earlier, White had been just another impossibly young-looking Harvard postdoc in flip-flops looking forward to a Cambridge summer. Helicopter gunships and war zones weren't on the radar; there were lattes in the square and rock climbing, and on the other side of campus, a prestigious fellowship in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where he was working at the intersection of big data, statistics, and machine learning. He had earned academic pole position and had every expectation it would continue that way forever -- becoming a professor, building a lab, and sniping out white papers from a tenured ivory tower.

One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction. Ex Machina, a Hollywood blockbuster made on a 15 million budget, tells the story of a programmer who is invited by his employer, the eccentric billionaire Nathan Bateman who built a fictional search engine called Blue Book, to administer the Turing test to an android with artificial intelligence, which essentially determines whether a computer can trick a human into believing she is having a conversation with another human. Everything in our online life is indexed. Every idle tweet, status update, or curious search query feeds the Google database.

Imagine custom shirts and shoes at mass production prices with same day delivery; imagine turbine parts produced at the airport where and when they are needed; imagine a new tooth made while you're in the dentist chair. The age of smart local manufacturing is just around the corner. Often called Industry 4.0, this new wave manufacturing incorporated connected devices (internet of things: IoT), cloud computing and machine learning. The term Industry 4.0 originated in 2011 with German government-funded research on advanced manufacturing. The second industrial revolution was mass production, starting around 1870, but best known for the assembly lines of Henry Ford 1913.

Imagine custom shirts and shoes at mass production prices with same day delivery; imagine turbine parts produced at the airport where and when they are needed; imagine a new tooth made while you're in the dentist chair. The age of smart local manufacturing is just around the corner. Often called Industry 4.0, this new wave manufacturing incorporated connected devices (internet of things: IoT), cloud computing and machine learning. The term Industry 4.0 originated in 2011 with German government-funded research on advanced manufacturing. The second industrial revolution was mass production, starting around 1870, but best known for the assembly lines of Henry Ford 1913.