Growing up in India, I've witnessed, read and worked on all sorts of different contracts. Still fresh in my mind are the verbal agreements people in my town would make with standard "net 30" payment terms while buying their groceries from the little shops near our house. While practicing law, I would review contracts on paper, often dictating the changes to my stenographer. Thankfully, the world has moved on and we increasingly use computers to draft contracts, emails, and even negotiations, thereby minimizing dependency on stenographers. Historically, once a contract is signed after weeks and sometimes months of hard work, it's left unattended for years on end in a musty cupboard, until some poor person has to spend half a day locating and dusting it down for use in a dispute.

Algerian student Fouzia Adjailia is the first Arab Muslim woman to ever enter the world of robotics, according to Al Arabiya. The young designer has built a robot that can listen, talk, walk and even dance. "Gardenia the robot has the ability to recognize individual persons' voices, speak like a real person, conversate with humans and dance to music - after putting it on by itself - all without the need for a remote control," Fouzia said. Fouzia has managed to grab media attention after building the robot in just under four months. "Building the robot was my university graduation project," explained Fawzieh, who will be graduating with a Master's degree in Wireless Application Protocol and Artificial Intelligence.

The Agung volcano erupts, spewing magma and ash thousands of feet into the air on the island of Bali in Indonesia in November 2017.Josh Edelson/ZUMA This story was originally published by Grist and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A trope of sci-fi movies these days, from Snowpiercer to Geostorm, is that our failure to tackle climate change will eventually force us to deploy an arsenal of unproven technologies to save the planet. Think sun-deflecting space mirrors or chemically altered clouds. And because these are sci-fi movies, it's assumed that these grand experiments in geoengineering will go horribly wrong. The fiction, new evidence suggests, may be much closer to reality than we thought.

There have been some dour predictions about the potential of artificial intelligence from some high-profile technologists. For example, billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has said AI will be more dangerous than North Korea. Legendary physicist Stephen Hawking says that AI has the potential to be the "worst event in the history of our civilization." But billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has added a bit of levity to the conversation. Gates says AI will mean longer vacations.

This weekend, Futurism got exclusive access to a closed-door round table on the global governance of AI. The event was organized by the AI Initiative from the Future Society at Harvard Kennedy and H.E. Omar bin Sultan Al Olama, the UAE's Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence. With over 50 of the world's foremost thinkers, leaders, and practitioners of AI in attendance, the conversation was--to be cliché--a hotbed for debate. These thought leaders convened with the goal of developing a road map for nations to follow as we transition to future where humans are no longer the only sentient species on the planet. During one session, which was focused on how to develop rules to govern AI, a panelist opened the discussion by implying that values are universal.

Maybe not, but North Korea's "charm offensive" and leader Kim Jong Un's invitation to South Korean President Moon Jae-in to visit Pyongyang "in the near future" will exacerbate existing fissures in Washington's alliance with Seoul as Pyongyang seeks to further chip away at the relationship. Kim, using the grand stage of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, was behind Saturday's offer to host Moon for talks in the North Korean capital, setting the stage for what would be the first meeting of Korean leaders in more than a decade. The personal invitation from Kim was delivered verbally by his younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, during talks and a lunch Moon hosted at the presidential Blue House in Seoul. Any meeting would represent a diplomatic coup for Moon, who swept to power last year on a policy of engagement with the isolated North while pursuing a diplomatic solution to the standoff over its nuclear and missile programs. Kim Jong Un wanted to meet Moon "in the near future" and would like for him to visit North Korea "at his earliest convenience," his sister told Moon, who had said "let's create the environment for that to be able to happen," Blue House spokesman Kim Eui-kyeom was quoted as saying.

"Today there are more great powers, so we have a multipolar rather than bipolar competition. The ideological rivalry has shifted from communism against capitalism to a new contest between authoritarian capitalism against liberal democratic capitalism. "There is far more trade between and among the great powers than there was during the Cold War, making all powers more hesitant to risk economically catastrophic conflict. But it also means we are less able to ignore one another or isolate ourselves from one another." The former national security advisor also revealed how the next all out war could escalate – beginning with cyber and anti-satellite tactics by the aggressor nation.

Technology plays the role of a double-edged sword in our lives. While many of us might welcome the respite of a few hours, or even a couple of days without access to our phones or gadgets, any longer and it might turn into a modern day nightmare: no online shopping, no social media, no Siri or Alexa, and the list could go on. Our increasing dependence on all things tech with every passing day means that companies need to constantly innovate and reinvent intelligent solutions with emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, IoT and Blockchain. And a glimpse into the minds of the people using these technologies to create these innovations, throw up some interesting results. Take Vishawsrao Salunkhe, an IBM Champion Developer from Bengaluru.

I recently led a group of 20 American tech investors to Israel in conjunction with the UJA and Israel's Ministry of Economy and Industry. We witnessed firsthand the innovation that has produced more than $22 billion of investments and acquisitions within the past year. We met with the University that produced Mobileye, with the investor that believed in its founder, and the network of every multinational company supporting the startup ecosystem. Mechatronics is blooming in the desert from the CyberTech Convention in Tel Aviv to the robotic labs at Capsula to the latest in autonomous driving inventions in the hills of Jerusalem. Sitting in a suspended conference room that floats three stories above the ground enclosed within the "greenest building in the Middle East," I had the good fortune to meet Torr Polakow of Curiosity Lab.

Think that human augmentation is still decades away? This week, government leaders met with experts and innovators ahead of the World Government Summit in Dubai. To determine the future of artificial intelligence. It was an event that attracted some of the biggest names in AI. Managers from IBM Watson, Microsoft, Facebook, OpenAI, Nest, Drive.ai, and Amazon AI.