Asia is leading the way in the robotics revolution. Last year, Asian manufacturers added more industrial robots to their operations than the rest of the world combined.

A Somali police officer says a car bomb blew up at the entrance of a restaurant in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, killing two people. Mohamed Hussein said the blast Saturday occurred at the Blue Sky restaurant close to the presidential palace. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing, but the Islamic extremist group of Shabab often carries out such attacks. Shabab, Al Qaeda's East African affiliate, is fighting to impose a strict version of Islam in this Horn of Africa nation. Despite losing a lot of ground in recent years, the extremist group continues to carry out lethal attacks in many parts of the country, especially in the capital.

Bots will become the next version of mobile apps, creating the emotional connection between brands and consumers through artificial intelligence (AI) and search, according to Ryan Gavin, GM at Microsoft for search, cloud and content. During Advertising Week, Gavin told Search Marketing Daily that bots will replace mobile applications. The conversations on bots will occur more often and will become the new app for brands; and natural language will become the use interface, he said. Microsoft this week announced a new group that will help accelerate the use of AI. About 500 computer scientists and engineers will support the team and will include Microsoft Research along with the company's Information Platform Group, Bing and Cortana -- natural language processing -- product groups, along with its Ambient Computing and Robotics teams.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard unveiled a new attack drone which is similar to a U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle captured five years ago and is capable of carrying bombs, state media reported on Saturday. The drone, called the "Saegheh," or Thunderbolt, was unveiled at an expo showcasing the latest achievements by the Revolutionary Guard. This photo released on Saturday, Oct. 1, 2016, by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, shows a new attack drone called Saegheh or Thunderbolt in an undisclosed location in Iran. "This long-range drone is capable of hitting four targets with smart precision-guided bombs with high accuracy," the head of the Revolutionary Guards' aerospace arm, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA, Reuters reported. The semi-official Tasnim news agency said the drone is similar to the RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone used by the U.S. Iran's state-run Press TV said the long-range drone can carry four precision-guided bombs.

Popular literature is replete with scary renditions of Artificial Intelligence. Numerous articles, stories, and novels depict an Eeeeeeeevil AI taking over the world to the detriment of humanity. . From my perspective it appears that all of HollyWeird and most of the legacy publishers to include the Hugo wanna-bes have bought into this meme. The world is doomed if we let the evil machine overlords take over. . I suggest that we have been in a war with a form of artificial intelligence since shortly after the Agricultural Revolution. .

My name is Josh Pause, and I'm trying to build a machine that can think. Have you ever stopped to ponder just how deliciously absurd that idea is? As a matter of fact, I'm not sure which is more absurd to me: a machine that can think, or, the fact that everyone around me assumes that this machine is both inevitable and destined to rise up and destroy us. These naysayers would have me believe that I am some sort of mad scientist, foolishly chasing my own blind ambitions towards the detriment of mankind. They would have me doubt my own intuition, my own instincts, and my own internal definitions of right and wrong. While we're on the subject of Stanley Kubrick, here's a fun bit of widely-believed trivia: In the late 1960s, NASA went to Stanley Kubrick for help in staging a fake moon landing.

Manulife has announced a new Lab of Forward Thinking (LOFT) location in Singapore, its third technology hub. LOFT, with existing operations in Toronto and Boston, explores emerging technologies in efforts to leverage them for its asset management and insurance businesses. "Our goal is to become the most customer-centric organization in our industry," said Roy Gori, president and CEO, Manulife Asia, in a statement. "Through the LOFT, we encourage experimentation, incubation and collaboration to find the answers we need to best serve our customers." Over the last six months, existing LOFTs have announced partnerships with ConsenSys, BlockApps, Nervana Systems and indico data solutions.

At Sundance earlier this year, the absurdist comedy "Swiss Army Man" rubbed so many critics and audience members the wrong way that it provoked mass walkouts and angry pans. But once the film moved from the festival circuit to the arthouse, it found an audience much more receptive to writer-directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan's gently twisted sense of humor. A combination of Robert Bresson and "Weekend at Bernie's," "Swiss Army Man" stars Paul Dano as a suicidal castaway who finds a flatulent corpse (played by Daniel Radcliffe) on the shore of a deserted island. He uses the dead man as a tool, a companion and an inspiration to survive. Filled with raunchy jokes and positive vibes, this is a movie that'll baffle some viewers, but it's such an original that it's hard not to admire.

Analysis The invitation for Google's latest cloud sales pitch, dubbed "Horizon" because the company has already had its way with "Atmosphere", on Thursday directed attendees to The Mint. As San Franciscans know, and Google Search advises to those in the area, The Mint is a karaoke bar, not far from the San Francisco Mint, which began churning out legal tender in 1937. The actual location of the affair turned out to be the Old US Mint, a classical edifice that, through the marketing value of its facade, now helps companies advance their efforts to print money. The cloud, for Google, represents something of a climb. As of August, Google trailed Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and IBM in public infrastructure-as-a-service marketshare, by the measure of Synergy Research Group.

Alphabet Inc's Google has renamed its business-to-business cloud computing brand and enhanced some enterprise applications using artificial intelligence, the company's latest gambit to better compete with Amazon.com and Microsoft Corp. in the lucrative cloud business. Discussing the rebranded Google Cloud, Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google's enterprise business, said the company has made good progress courting customers and improving its technology. Cloud computing uses remote internet servers to store, manage and process data, and Google offers a range of apps like word processing and email, as well as the ability to host data and offer resources for developers. The new name replaces the Google for Work brand. "We are closing the gap incredibly fast" with competitors, Greene, a former CEO of VMware who joined Google last year to ramp up its cloud business, told experts and journalists at an event.