COUNTRIES grow richer when they learn how to produce more valuable stuff per person. Sadly, many advanced economies seem to have lost the knack. Except for a brief spurt around the turn of the millennium, productivity has grown painfully slowly in rich countries over the last four decades (see chart)--a factor, economists reckon, that has contributed to stagnant pay. Labour productivity in America fell at a startling 2.2% annual pace in the fourth quarter of 2015; growth of 0.6% for the year as a whole was better, but hardly impressive. Orthodox explanations for the problem tend to fall into one of three categories.

The automated aircraft are planned to work alongside Domino's current delivery fleet and will be integrated into its online ordering and GPS systems, according to the firm. Domino's Group CEO and Managing Director, Don Meij, said the company's growth in recent years had led to a "significant increase" in the number of deliveries it needs to make. "With the increased number of deliveries we make each year, we were faced with the challenge of ensuring our delivery times continue to decrease and that we strive to offer our customers new and progressive ways of ordering from us," he said. Research into different delivery methods led Domino's to Flirtey, whose success within the airborne delivery space has been "impressive", the CEO added. The two companies demonstrated their drone pizza delivery service in Auckland, New Zealand, yesterday – an event attended by the country's Civil Aviation Authority and its Minister of Transport Simon Bridges.

Naturally, the board already has some advice. It recommends that the Pentagon gather more intelligence on other nations' AI capabilities, and develop "counter-autonomy" solutions. The military could deceive or overwhelm autonomous war machines, for example. Also, the writers suggest that the US pour many more resources into developing and testing learning AI, such as weapons that adapt to battlefield conditions. There's no guarantee that officials will heed the advice, or even that it's absolutely necessary.

It took a while for the US military to bolster its defenses against cyberattacks, and it looks like there's a similar deficit when it comes to artificial intelligence. A new Defense Department report says that the country needs to take "immediate action" to speed up its development of AI war technology. Academic and private research on AI and autonomous tech is well ahead of American forces, the study says. There's a real chance that we could see a repeat of what happened in cyberwarfare, where the US was focused so heavily on launching attacks that it left itself off-guard. Naturally, the board already has some advice.

Internet search giants making self-driving cars appears to be a trend, and Russia's Yandex wants in. It's partnering with Daimler, truck maker Kamaz and government-backed researchers at NAMI on an autonomous shuttle bus that could carry up to 12 people and travel about 124 miles on a charge. Yandex is contributing its experiences with artificial intelligence, computer vision and voice recognition, and it'll even be central to the interface -- you'll use a Yandex-linked mobile app to pinpoint your destination. NAMI will start testing the self-driving bus on closed circuits in 2017, and it's bound to be a while after that before you can see one (or something like it) cruising the streets. There's no guarantee that you'll ever get to ride this bus beyond Russian borders, but it wouldn't be surprising if Yandex's technology finds its way into more vehicles. If nothing else, this is further evidence that driverless transportation is quickly becoming a worldwide phenomenon.

Technology companies are hurriedly snapping up startups in the field of artificial intelligence, and Intel Corp. INTC 0.48 % is the latest to join a buying spree fueled by one of the hottest trends in the tech sector. The chip maker on Tuesday announced plans to pay an undisclosed amount for Nervana Systems, a 48-employee company working on semiconductors, software and services to exploit a popular AI technique called deep learning. Intel's move follows a deal disclosed Friday by Apple Inc. AAPL -0.59 % to purchase Turi Inc., a Seattle-based specialist in the field. The two acquisitions add to a string of 31 purchases since 2011 of AI startups by large companies, according to venture-capital research firm CB Insights. Factoring in smaller acquirers, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP counts 29 related acquisitions so far this year, suggesting the total deal count for 2016 will top the 37 deals announced last year.

Forget ideology, liberal democracy's newest threats come from technology and bioscience

Machine learning is nipping at the heels of conventional physical modeling of air quality predictions in more and more places. The latest is Johannesburg, South Africa, where computer engineer Tapiwa M. Chiwewe at the newly opened IBM Research lab is adapting IBM's air quality prediction software to local needs and adding new capabilities. The work is an expansion of the so-called Green Horizons initiative, in which IBM researchers partnered with Chinese government researchers and officials, starting two years ago. Last month, Chiwewe presented some of the Johannesburg lab's first results, involving ground-level ozone level predictions, at the 14th International Conference on Industrial Informatics in Poitiers, France. "You can do a lot of physics to understand how ozone is found in different places," he says, "but what we did is we just collected a lot of data and trained these machines on it and they were able to predict [local ozone levels] without any knowledge of how ozone works in the atmosphere."

It is hard to miss the warnings. In the race to make computers more intelligent than us, humanity will summon a demon, bring forth the end of days, and code itself into oblivion. Instead of silicon assistants we'll build silicon assassins. The doomsday story of an evil AI has been told a thousand times. But our fate at the hand of clever cloggs robots may in fact be worse - to summon a class of eternally useless human beings.

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