ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Artificial Intelligence's White Guy Problem Kate Crawford The New York Times "Like all technologies before it, artificial intelligence will reflect the values of its creators. So inclusivity matters--from who designs it to who sits on the company boards and which ethical perspectives are included. Otherwise, we risk constructing machine intelligence that mirrors a narrow and privileged vision of society, with its old, familiar biases and stereotypes." ROBOTICS: How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race Kim Bhasin and Patrick Clark Bloomberg "For the new breed of robot makers, the potential market is wide open. Logistics companies that run their own warehouses started designing automatons while ambitious engineers saw the hole Bezos blew in the market and jumped in...As promising as all this technology may be, robots aren't going to do away with human-run warehouses entirely--not yet, anyway."

The problem of how to defend a country changes when your attacker isn't acting rationally. Terrorists put their causes above their home country and don't necessarily fear death or retaliation. So shortly after 9/11, Milind Tambe, a professor of computer science and engineering at USC, proposed a radical new style of protection: Why not use artificial intelligence to make your own targets harder to attack? By matching predictive algorithms with machine learning and some massive processing power, you could create a computer program capable of figuring out how to deploy limited security forces around sensitive places most effectively. The trick would be for those schedules or formations to remain unpredictable.

United States President Barack Obama's administration said Friday that up to 116 civilians have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and other countries where America is not at war. Obama's goal for the release of the numbers is reportedly to create greater transparency about the actions of the U.S. military and CIA in counterterrorism measures against militants plotting attacks against the United States. The announcement covered strikes from the day Obama took office in January 2009 through Dec. 31, 2015. The report by National Intelligence Director James Clapper said the U.S. conducted 473 counterterror strikes, including those by unmanned drones, in this period. Even though the report does not mention the countries where the attacks were carried out, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the Defense Department and CIA have pursued targets in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya.

WASHINGTON – The United States on Friday lifted the lid on one of the most controversial tactics of President Barack Obama's secretive counterterrorism campaign, detailing for the first time the number killed in airstrikes in countries like Pakistan and Libya. The White House also released an executive order outlining the steps that should be taken to reduce civilian casualties in America's battle against violent extremism. In a much-anticipated report, National Intelligence Director James Clapper provided fatality estimates for the 473 strikes between 2009 and 2015 that were conducted outside America's principal war zones in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. He said between 64 and 116 civilians were killed, and up to 2,581 combatants. Such attacks are typically conducted via drones, though manned warplanes and missiles have also been used.

Elon Musk is pretty sure that we're in some sort of simulation. Musk explained that, given the advances we've made in computer graphics and virtual reality in just a few decades, it's almost definite that there's a more advanced civilization playing or monitoring us like characters, in a game world that is "indistinguishable from reality." Big Bang Games and God Studios have teamed up once again for the latest iteration of "Reality"--the four hundred and sixty-seventh release in the popular series--dropping gamers into a simulation of the planet Earth in the year 2016 A.D. Players who found earlier versions to be lacking in drama will be pleased that the new "Reality" finds humanity on the cusp of complete antibiotic resistance and irreversible climate change. Here are the key takeaways. In-game tasks vary greatly depending on geographical location.

After escalating one of the most lethal covert operations in U.S. history, President Obama finally made a public estimate of the civilian cost of the nation's secret drone program, which has targeted Islamic militants in remote corners of the globe. Human rights groups immediately challenged the estimate and the amount of transparency from the administration, saying both were too limited. The White House said that 64 to 116 civilians had been wrongly killed in 473 strikes launched by the U.S. government from the time Obama was inaugurated and the end of last year. The vast majority of the attacks were launched by drones, officials said, but the estimate also covers some strikes using manned aircraft. Monitoring organizations estimate the number of civilians killed in U.S. strikes ranges from 200 to more than 1,000.

The Obama administration announced on Friday that the United States has killed a much lower number of civilians in drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia than have been previously estimated by outside researchers. A report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that airstrikes (overwhelmingly by drones) killed between 64 and 116 civilians in those four countries from 2009 to 2015. The numbers excluded "areas of active hostilities" such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. The report is the first time the Obama administration has provided official estimates of the death toll in the secretive drone war. President Barack Obama also issued an executive order on Friday that requires the government to deliver an unclassified report on drone strikes each year that includes the number of combatants and non-combatants killed.

The White House has said that up to 116 civilians have been killed by drone and other US strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya since Barack Obama took office in 2009, a figure that has been slammed by watchdog groups as an undercount, which suggests that the real figure could be as high as 1,100. Published by the Director of National Intelligence on Friday, the report said that between January 20, 2009, and December 31, 2015, the US carried out 473 strikes, which killed up to 2,581 "combatants" and anywhere from 64 to 116 civilians. The civilian casualties disclosed in the report were from nations not recognised as "battlefields," and did not reflect US air attacks in "areas of active hostilities" such as Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria. Watchdog and rights groups have long claimed that the US administration does not know how many civilians it has killed and does not do enough to prevent civilian casualties when carrying out counterterrorism operations. Reprieve, an international human rights organisation, said the US government's previous statements about the drone programme have proven to be false by its own internal documents. It said the Obama administration has "shifted the goalposts on what counts as a'civilian' to such an extent that any estimate may be far removed from reality".

The White House said Friday that as many as 116 civilians have been killed by drone and other U.S. strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Africa since President Barack Obama took office in 2009. In its first public assessment, the administration said the death toll was between 64 and 116 civilians between January 2009 and December 2015, which is significantly lower than civilian casualty estimates by various human rights groups. The number of combatants killed in those 473 strikes was between 2,372 and 2,581. Seeking to create a precedent for his successor, Obama signed an executive order that details U.S. policies to limit civilian casualties and makes protecting civilians a central element in U.S. military operations planning. The order requires an annual release of casualty estimates.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House said Friday that as many as 116 civilians have been killed by drone and other U.S. strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Africa since President Barack Obama took office in 2009. In its first public assessment, the administration said the death toll was between 64 and 116 civilians between January 2009 and December 2015, which is significantly lower than civilian casualty estimates by various human rights groups. The number of combatants killed in those 473 strikes was between 2,372 and 2,581. Seeking to create a precedent for his successor, Obama signed an executive order that details U.S. policies to limit civilian casualties and makes protecting civilians a central element in U.S. military operations planning. The order requires an annual release of casualty estimates.