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.

Few companies offer something so popular that their name becomes a verb. But that is one of the many achievements of Uber, a company founded in 2009 which is now the world's most valuable startup, worth around 70 billion. Its app can summon a car in moments in more than 425 cities around the world, to the fury of taxi drivers everywhere. But Uber's ambitions, and the expectations underpinning its valuation, extend much further: using self-driving vehicles, it wants to make ride-hailing so cheap and convenient that people forgo car ownership altogether. Not satisfied with shaking up the 100-billion-a-year taxi business, it has its eye on the far bigger market for personal transport, worth as much as 10 trillion a year globally.

People walk past a LG Electronics logo during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, February 25, 2016. SEOUL South Korea's LG Electronics Inc said on Sunday it will aggressively invest in robots, seeking to capitalize on advancing artificial intelligence that may eventually lead to sophisticated machines performing everyday human tasks. LG, in a statement, said its appliances division is preparing the firm's entry into the robotics industry with the aim to develop products that will work closely with home appliances products such as refrigerators, washers and air conditioning units. "We will prepare for the future by aggressively investing in smart home, robots and key components and strengthen the home appliances business's capabilities," said Jo Seung-jin, head of LG's appliances business, in the statement. Advances in fields such as artificial intelligence and wireless communications are allowing for more sophisticated machines that can talk to each other via the internet and perform more complex tasks.

Which is impossible: a computer needs information or facts to make decisions. Unfortunately, 'facts' are often skewed by humans for personal or political purposes. Saying such, however, is to your advantage. If the computer is wrong, you are guiltless. If correct, you benefit as the creator of the computer.

SHANGHAI/HONG KONG The Chinese government said on Friday it was investigating two high-profile takeover proposals involving U.S. companies, the latest sign of its growing influence on whether deals are approved - even those appearing to have little impact in China.

I can't remember whose idea it was to go out for lunch. It might have been my idea. Of course it was my idea. I start thinking about lunch the second that last morsel of granola hits my taste buds and disappears down that endless cavern known as my belly. Should we order a salad?

"…radically optimized processes and marketplaces that leverage Watson, IBM Cloud, IBM Systems, Blockchain, deep domain expertise and ecosystems of partners and developers." 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. Hey guyz, i wanted to know about ensembling, and are we allowed to that on this training set, because the title mentions only random forest as a predictive algorithm. Kawasaki is establishing artificial intelligence for motorbike that will enable future bikes to chat with their riders, and even enable them to control the cycles using their voice.

Protests in the ethnic Russian enclave in Riga, Latvia have NATO on edge. Russian units in the Western Military District are on alert conducting snap exercises involving autonomous ground and air attack systems. The Russian president makes a speech promising to protect ethnic Russians wherever they are with military forces if necessary. In response, a U.S. Army brigade combat team bolstered by intelligence, air defense, and aviation support elements from U.S. Army Europe deploys. Their mission is to reassure Latvian forces, deter Russian aggression, and if necessary conduct a mobile defense.

Nvidia and Baidu have agreed to collaborate on the incorporation of artificial intelligence in a cloud-to-car autonomous vehicle platform, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said Wednesday at the Baidu World Conference in Beijing. The companies plan to integrate Baidu's cloud platform and mapping technology with Nvidia's self-driving computing platform. They will work together to create solutions for high-definition maps, Level 3 autonomous vehicle control and automated parking. "We're going to bring together the technical capabilities and the expertise in AI and the scale of two world-class AI companies to build the self-driving car architecture from end-to-end, from top-to-bottom, from the cloud to the car," Jen-Hsun said. "We can start applying these capabilities to solve the grand challenges of AI, one of which is intelligent machines," he added.

In a world where personal information is ubiquitous and accessible, shouldn't you have the right to be forgotten? How should we deal with traces of our online selves? These are just two of many questions and issues explored in Sheila Jasanoff's new book, The Ethics of Invention, which published this week. Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, explores ethical issues that have been created by technological advances--from how we should deal with large-scale disasters such as Bhopal or Chernobyl to the more hidden conundrums of data collection, privacy, and our relationship with tech giants like Facebook and Google. Jasanoff believes we don't sufficiently acknowledge how much power we've handed over to technology, which, she writes, "rules us as much as laws do."