The first international beauty contest judged by "machines" was supposed to use objective factors such as facial symmetry and wrinkles to identify the most attractive contestants. After Beauty.AI launched this year, roughly 6,000 people from more than 100 countries submitted photos in the hopes that artificial intelligence, supported by complex algorithms, would determine that their faces most closely resembled "human beauty". But when the results came in, the creators were dismayed to see that there was a glaring factor linking the winners: the robots did not like people with dark skin. Out of 44 winners, nearly all were white, a handful were Asian, and only one had dark skin. That's despite the fact that, although the majority of contestants were white, many people of color submitted photos, including large groups from India and Africa.

Israel has deployed autonomous military vehicles to patrol the border of the Palestinian Authority. These vehicles are apparently unarmed, so far, and groups of them are controlled by a remotely placed soldier, so they are not quite up to the level of a Robocop, which I suppose is some kind of relief. There are no fully robotic warriors out there, yet. Something along the lines of, that which does not kill us now, might still kill us later if we aren't ready. The short version of all this is that as AI research engages more and more with the real world, things may take some dangerous turns.

APPLE's events have often been compared to religious worship. Evangelical fans watch as the company's darkly-clad boss--first Steve Jobs, now Tim Cook--presents shiny new iSomethings in front of a screen showing colourful slides reminiscent of stained glass. Yet Apple's latest event, on September 7th, was a less rapturous affair. The iPhone 7, the firm's new smartphone, will come with a better camera, a faster chip and a brighter display, but will otherwise not be much of an improvement. The main novelty is that it no longer has a conventional jack for headphones, which have to plug into the charging port or be wireless (conveniently, Apple also introduced new untethered "AirPods", which will cost 160 a pair).

As the artificial intelligence market is projected to grow by 53% in by 2020, advertisers are looking for ways to use the technology to their advantage. Vernon Vasu, CMO at ReFUEL4 states that researchers are looking into using AI for creative development in the future, but for now advertisers can use AI's incredible data mining and organizing capabilities to understand audiences like never before Artificial intelligence is one of the most buzzed-about terms in technology. The AI market is estimated to reach 5.05 billion USD by 2020, up from 419.7 million USD in 2014 – a 53% increase. With the launch of Facebook's chatbots, Amazon's Echo, and IBM's Watson, companies in many fields are considering how they can use new AI tools to their advantage. Advertising agencies that use AI, machine learning, and image recognition are hyper-targeting consumers by learning their interests and tastes.

Three years ago, Jeff Bezos announced that drones are eventually going to deliver Amazon orders. In the past year, he brought out Amazon's Alexa artificial intelligence service, which understands speech well enough that you can say, "Alexa, I really need a waffle cone maker," and she'll put one in your Amazon online shopping cart, even though nobody needs a waffle cone maker. Both of these technologies--drones and cloud AI--are exciting today, yet still wobbly works in progress. But in coming years, Amazon or some other company is going to put them together. And that, finally, will evolve into a technology that could become as significant to humans as domesticated dogs.

Could robots be carrying out the most crimes by 2040? RoboCop, Chappie, the Terminator movies and i,Robot - there have been many films where we have been encouraged to respect, love but also fear robots – and I for one can say I will never be trusting them! And apparently I am right not to after researchers have found robots could be the offenders committing most crimes by 2040. Tracey Follows from The Future Laboratory, which helps businesses plan for the future through its research and consultancy experts, has been looking at the issues after more and more robots could be used in industries replacing humans on jobs. Ms Follows, chief strategy and innovation officer at, speaking to the Times Raconteur: 'Futurists have been forecasting a sharp rise in lone-wolf terror attacks for years.

Later today Nasa hopes to launch a spacecraft on its journey towards an asteroid, where it will collect and return samples that experts believe may hold the building blocks of life. Nasa's OSRIS-REx spacecraft will travel for two years to reach Bennu, and plans to return to Earth in 2023. Fitted with sensors, the craft will map out the surface of the asteroid in order to address basic questions about the composition of the very early solar system. Final preparations: Forecasters said good weather was expected for the 7:05 PM EDT launch. But Nasa has until mid-October to send the SUV-size spacecraft on its way.

IPhone owners will get an upgrade on September 13 that allows them to find a picture of nearly anyone or anything, anywhere and from any time. Neural network artificial intelligence in the new iOS 10 performs 11 billion calculations in a tenth of a second on each photo snapped to figure out who people are and even what mood they're in. Aipoly, an app released in January, recognizes objects and speaks their names aloud to blind people. Google Translate can replace text in one language with another language as soon as you point your camera at it. All this happens even if you can't get cell reception.

Welcome to robot nursery school," Pieter Abbeel says as he opens the door to the Robot Learning Lab on the seventh floor of a sleek new building on the northern edge of the UC-Berkeley campus. The lab is chaotic: bikes leaning against the wall, a dozen or so grad students in disorganized cubicles, whiteboards covered with indecipherable equations. Abbeel, 38, is a thin, wiry guy, dressed in jeans and a stretched-out T-shirt. He moved to the U.S. from Belgium in 2000 to get a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford and is now one of the world's foremost experts in understanding the challenge of teaching robots to think intelligently. But first, he has to teach them to "think" at all. "That's why we call this nursery school," he jokes. He introduces me to Brett, a six-foot-tall humanoid robot made by Willow Garage, a high-profile Silicon Valley robotics manufacturer that is now out of business. The lab acquired the robot several years ago to experiment with. Brett, which stands for ...

We get the science fiction we need at the time we need it. When "Star Trek" premiered on Sept. 8, 1966, the United States was escalating its involvement in the Vietnam War while also reckoning with the civil rights movement -- not to mention waging a cold war with the Soviet Union that seemed always on the verge of heating up. Right along with that tumult was the beacon of scientific hope that was NASA's space program, which in turn stoked the passion of an America obsessed with tomorrow. World's fairs were in the business of showing us the cars, kitchens and cities of tomorrow. Writer-producer Gene Roddenberry channeled those twin poles of the human condition -- strife and hope -- into "Star Trek," the show he pitched to NBC as " 'Wagon Train' to the stars."