For the second time in a week, a robot in Russia that is programmed with advanced artificial intelligence as well as an ability to learn from experiences and about its surroundings has escaped the facility that it is housed in. A robot in Russia caused an unusual traffic jam last week after it "escaped" from a research lab, and now, the artificially intelligent bot is making headlines again after it reportedly tried to flee a second time, according to news reports. Engineers at the Russian lab reprogrammed the intelligent machine, dubbed Promobot IR77, after last week's incident, but the robot recently made a second escape attempt, The Mirror reported. Last week, the robot made it approximately 160 feet (50 meters) to the street, before it lost power and "partially paralyzed" traffic. The first time the robot escaped it was due to an improperly latched gate.

AS DOOMSDAY SCENARIOS go, it does not sound terribly frightening. The "paperclip maximiser" is a thought experiment proposed by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University. Imagine an artificial intelligence, he says, which decides to amass as many paperclips as possible. It devotes all its energy to acquiring paperclips, and to improving itself so that it can get paperclips in new ways, while resisting any attempt to divert it from this goal. Eventually it "starts transforming first all of Earth and then increasing portions of space into paperclip manufacturing facilities". This apparently silly scenario is intended to make the serious point that AIs need not have human-like motives or psyches.

In his quest to transform the way the Pentagon wages war, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has turned to Silicon Valley, hoping its experimental culture, innovation and sense of urgency would rub off on the rigid bureaucracy he runs. Carter has made several trips to the region and appointed Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google's parent company to an advisory board. And recently he sat down at the Pentagon with Elon Musk to see what suggestions the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX might have to make the nation's military more efficient and daring. "Having an incentive structure that rewards innovation is extremely important," he said in an interview after the meeting. Whatever you reward will happen." The Pentagon finds itself in a new arms race, struggling to keep pace with forms of combat that are fought with bytes as well as bullets. The technological advancements disrupting established business sectors are now shaking up the world of war - where robots, swarming drones and ...

Tiny cartoonish characters mill around a cartoon village on a player's phone screen, building cute little armies that they let loose on enemy camps. Often, just when things are going really great for the clan, resources run out; then players have to wait a few hours while the game slowly regenerates gold and elixir, or they can spend four dollars and ninety-nine cents to buy in-game currency and keep playing right away. Since most of us are impatient, Supercell, the company that makes Clash of Clans, has done quite nicely. Those real-money-for-virtual-stuff purchases, or micro-transactions, contributed to the company's 2.3 billion dollars in sales in 2015. This week, the China-based company Tencent Holdings paid 8.6 billion dollars for a controlling stake in Supercell, and therefore a stake in our need for instant gratification.

That is what I said when I was asked whether we would ever see computer science taught in K–12. It was 2009, and I was addressing a gathering of attendees to a workshop on computational thinking (http://bit.ly/1NjmcRJ) It has been 10 years since I published my three-page "Computational Thinking" Viewpoint (http://bit.ly/1W73ekv) in the March 2006 issue of Communications. To celebrate its anniversary, let us consider how far we've come. Since the dotcom bust, there had been a steep and steady decline in undergraduate enrollments in computer science, with no end in sight.

The 19th-century U.K. Locomotive Act, also known as the Red Flag Act, required motorized vehicles to be preceded by a person waving a red flag to signal the oncoming danger. Movies can be a good place to see what the future looks like. According to Robert Wallace, a retired director of the CIA's Office of Technical Service: "... When a new James Bond movie was released, we always got calls asking, 'Do you have one of those?' If I answered'no', the next question was, 'How long will it take you to make it?' Folks didn't care about the laws of physics or that Q was an actor in a fictional series--his character and inventiveness pushed our imagination ..."3 As an example, the CIA successfully copied the shoe-mounted spring-loaded and poison-tipped knife in From Russia With Love. It's interesting to speculate on what else Bond movies may have led to being invented. For this reason, I have been considering what movies predict about the future of artificial intelligence (AI). One theme that emerges in several science fiction movies is that of an AI mistaken for human.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) may sound intimidating, but Dean said enterprises don't need the technical resources of a company like Google to get started. There are now lots of options that let businesses bring their own data to machine learning platforms that contain pretrained models or algorithms that organizations can train themselves. Google offers such a service, and the Spark data processing engine contains a library of machine learning algorithms. Such offerings lower the bar to entry. Other speakers at the Spark conference agreed the time is ripe for machine learning applications across various vertical markets.

Who do we become when we die? Our identities are such fragile, personally curated things: we go through life as children, then students and peers, and sometimes switch to a vocational preference. A person becomes farmer, shepherd, mechanic, soldier, baker, homemaker, brigand, or bandit, or backyard bomb-maker -- whichever strikes us by calling or necessity. People assume narrower identities, a lover for an afternoon, a wedding guest for a weekend. Perhaps it's the wrong wedding, the wrong place, the wrong people, and whatever mish-mash of identities, they end with a hellfire strike and a grim, clinical finality. The bodies become "military-age males," the rich matrixes of interwoven identities collapsed into two categories, a fatal guilt decided abroad in the moment of impact.

In what is being perceived as another attempt to tighten its control over the internet, China's internet regulator on Saturday announced new rules that ban search engines from showing subversive information and obligate them to clearly identify paid results. The new regulations, which will take effect from Aug. 1, come close on the heels of the death of a 21-year-old college student, who is believed to have undergone an unapproved, experimental cancer treatment he found using the search engine Baidu. "Some search results lack objectivity and fairness, go against corporate morals and standards, misleading and influencing people's judgment," the Cyberspace Administration of China -- the country's internet regulator -- reportedly said. "Internet search providers should earnestly accept corporate responsibility toward society, and strengthen their own management in accordance with the law and rules, to provide objective, fair and authoritative search results to users." In addition, search engines would also be required to censor "rumors, obscenities, pornography, violence, murder, terrorism and other illegal information" -- regulations that the Chinese government claims are needed to safeguard the security of its citizens.

HOW HAS ARTIFICIAL intelligence, associated with hubris and disappointment since its earliest days, suddenly become the hottest field in technology? The term was coined in a research proposal written in 1956 which suggested that significant progress could be made in getting machines to "solve the kinds of problems now reserved for humans…if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer". That proved to be wildly overoptimistic, to say the least, and despite occasional bursts of progress, AI became known for promising much more than it could deliver. Researchers mostly ended up avoiding the term, preferring to talk instead about "expert systems" or "neural networks". The rehabilitation of "AI", and the current excitement about the field, can be traced back to 2012 and an online contest called the ImageNet Challenge.