An ambitious mission that will visit a comet and pluck a boulder from its surface to create an orbiting base for astronauts has been given the final go-ahead. A robot shipwill pluck a large boulder off an asteroid and sling it aroundthe moon, becoming a destination to prepare for futurehuman missions to Mars, the U.S. space agency has revealed. The so-called Asteroid Redirect Mission is estimated to costabout 1.4 billion not including launch costs and is targetedfor liftoff in December 2021. In the Spacecraft Structures Lab at NASA's Langley Research Center, the Asteroid Redirect Mission robotic contact and restraint system is prototyped and tested. A robot ship will pluck a large boulder off an asteroid and drag it into orbit around the moon, becoming a'testbed' for future human missions to Mars, the U.S. space agency has revealed.

Trevor Sumner is a successful NYC-based technologist, CTO and co-founder of LocalVox, avid scuba diver, fisherman, amateur cook and adventure traveler. As the CTO of a marketing technology company, my main challenge is to keep up with rapid changes in technology and consumer behavior in order to create differentiated growth. In the last 10 years, mobile and social media have disrupted advertising, software and consumer electronics. Just like the rise of the PC and internet a decade before, these are foundational disruptions. Multiple groundbreaking technologies are looking to change how we interact with products, companies and each other, and they are being driven by a perfect storm of dependent innovation.

There is a surge of interest and research into Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is seen as the new technological revolution in the work place with machines tipped to replace most human jobs. There is significant improvement in the field of AI currently, than in the history of mankind, AI has been branded a failure or a hype in the past, but that notion does not seem to be the case anymore with the emergence of more sophisticated computer algorithms that have helped machines to pass the Turin Test – A test which determines whether or not a machine computer is capable of thinking like a human. Critics have branded the Turin test an emotionally unsatisfying test for intelligence but agreed that a machine passing the Turin test is an important milestone for AI. It is important to highlight that to get more conclusive results from tests of AI, the Turin test has had twists and variations from the original test by Alan Turin.

In 1991, Microsoft founded Microsoft Research, a division for the company's army of PhDs and scientists to pursue the coolest, wildest, most science-fictional ideas they possibly could, with the very non-corporate goal of expanding human knowledge. They came up with some incredible stuff. Over the years, Microsoft Research contributed to a whole mess of inventions including Google Maps-style global mapping, voice recognition software, and the smartwatch. The problem was, very few of those cool academic discoveries were actually making their way back to Microsoft's actual commercial products. Microsoft may have invented the tablet, but the Apple iPad ran away with the market.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the term "artificial intelligence" became synonymous with The Terminator movies. And it was a bleak look at technology, too – capped off by a future where humankind struggled to survive after Skynet went rogue. Today's tech startups are a little more optimistic. They argue that AI technology will make life easier and more efficient in any number of industries – including agriculture. And "the future" may arrive sooner than you might think.

Robert Gordon has written a magnificent book on the economic history of the United States over the last one and a half centuries. His study focuses on what he calls the "special century" from 1870 to 1970--in which living standards increased more rapidly than at any time before or after. The book is without peer in providing a statistical analysis of the uneven pace of growth and technological change, in describing the technologies that led to the remarkable progress during the special century, and in concluding with a provocative hypothesis that the future is unlikely to bring anything approaching the economic gains of the earlier period. The message of Rise and Fall is this. For most of human history, economic progress moved at a crawl. According to the economic historian Bradford DeLong, from the first rock tools used by humanoids three million years ago, to the earliest cities ten thousand years ago, through the Middle Ages, to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around 1800, living standards doubled (with a growth of 0.00002 percent per year). Another doubling took place over the subsequent period to 1870. Then, according to standard calculations, the world economy took off. Gordon focuses on growth in the United States.

The private spaceflight company landed its Falcon 9 rocket for the sixth time in the last eight months early Sunday morning, pulling off the feat during the successful launch of the JCSAT-16 commercial communications satellite. The two-stage Falcon 9 lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 1:26 a.m. EDT Sunday, carrying JCSAT-16 toward a distant geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO). Less than 9 minutes later, the rocket's first stage came back for a pinpoint landing on the deck of a robotic ship called Of Course I Still Love You, which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean a few hundred miles off the Florida coast. A textbook touchdown had been anything but guaranteed. "Given this mission's GTO destination, the first stage will be subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating, making a successful landing challenging," SpaceX representatives wrote in a pre-launch JCSAT-16 press kit.

Wee-Hyong Tok has decades of database systems experience, spanning academia and industry, including deep experience driving and shipping products and services that span distributed engineering teams from Asia and the United States. Before joining Microsoft, Tok worked on in-database analytics, demonstrating how association rule mining can be integrated into a relational database management system, Predator-Miner, which enables users to express data mining operations using SQL queries and provides opportunities for better query optimization and processing. Tok is instrumental in driving data mining boot camps in Asia and was honored as a Microsoft SQL Server Most Valuable Professional for several consecutive years because of his active contribution to the database community in Asia. He has co-authored several books, including the first book on Azure machine learning, Predictive Analytics with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, and has also published more than 20 peer-reviewed academic papers and journals. Tok holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the National University of Singapore.

The supercomputer swiftly cross-referenced a patient's genetic data to make a diagnosis that would have taken a human doctor weeks. In a world where big data is fast transforming healthcare across the globe, PCs could not only assist GPs, but eventually, replace them. Now, it appears that IBM's supercomputer Watson has greatly speeded up the diagnosis of a rare form of leukemia in a patient, and in doing so, may have saved her life. In January 2015, the patient was admitted to a hospital affiliated to the University of Tokyo's Institute of Medical Science in Japan. Doctors initially diagnosed her with acute myeloid leukemia, a type of blood cancer.

Automation will undoubtedly transform the workforce, the economy, and society as a whole. Robotics, sophisticated "AI" software, and other technologies will cause lasting and profound changes in the future. But that's no reason to ignore the problems we're facing right now. In fact, the best way to ensure that we have a more equitable economy tomorrow is by fighting for one today. Two recent commentaries addressed the "robot question."