GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA – Wearing black headsets with tentacle-like sensors stretched over their foreheads, the competitors stared at cubes floating on computer screens as their small white drones prepared for takeoff. "Three, two, one … go!" the announcer hollered, and as the racers fixed their thoughts on pushing the cubes, the drones suddenly whirred, rose and buzzed through the air. Some struggled to move, while others zipped confidently across the finish line. The competition -- billed as the world's first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface -- involved 16 pilots using willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard (9.1-meter) dash over an indoor basketball court at the University of Florida on April 16. Organizers hope to make the event an annual intercollegiate spectacle, involving ever-more dynamic moves and challenges.

SEOUL--Humanity has fallen to artificial intelligence in checkers, chess, and, last month, Go, the complex ancient Chinese board game. But some of the world's biggest nerds are confident that machines will meet their Waterloo on the pixelated battlefields of the computer strategy game StarCraft. A key reason: Unlike machines, humans are good at lying. StarCraft, created in 1998, is one of the world's most popular computer game franchises. It pits three races against one another: the humanlike Terrans, the slimy insectoid Zerg and a mystical race with psionic powers called the Protoss.

Artificial intelligence is being used to reduce poaching. Scientists have developed an AI system that uses – and learns from – information on where poaching is taking place to map out the most effective patrols for rangers seeking to protect wildlife. Thousands of animals are illegally killed every day for their skin, traditional medicines and trophy hunting. As a result, wild tiger populations have decreased 95% over the past 100 years, black rhinos have reduced by 98% since 1960, and more than 30,000 elephants are killed each year for their ivory. Human patrols are the most direct way to protect wildlife from poachers.

Today, inside the towering glass and steel Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Seoul, South Korea, Google will put the future of artificial intelligence to the test. At one o'clock in the afternoon local time, a digital Google creation will challenge one of the world's top players at the game of Go, the ancient Eastern pastime that's often compared to chess--though it's exponentially more complex. This Google machine is called AlphaGo, and to win, it must mimic not just the analytical skills of a human, but at least a bit of human intuition. Over the years, machines have topped the best humans at checkers, chess, Othello, Scrabble, Jeopardy!, and so many other contests of human intellect. But they haven't beat the very best at Go.

It's fun to ponder a future filled with self-driving cars, a world with breezy commutes where robot navigators have made deadly crashes a thing of the past. But how far off is that future, really? Last month, Google suggested that this driverless utopia may actually be much further away than many people may realize. In a speech at SXSW in Austin, Google's car project director Chris Urmson explained that the day when fully autonomous vehicles are widely available, going anywhere that regular cars can, might be as much as 30 years away. There are still serious technical and safety challenges to overcome. In the near term, self-driving cars may be limited to more narrow situations and clearer weather.

Baidu, China's most popular search engine, like its US-based counterpart Google, is heavily investing in autonomous driving technologies and today it officially announced the launch of a self-driving car R&D center in Silicon Valley, right in Google's backyard. The company expects its team will grow to over 100 researchers and engineers by the end of the year. The company already moved several of its staff from its newly-created Autonomous Driving Unit (ADU) to Sunnyvale and recently hired a Tesla Autopilot software engineer. Liang Heng, a PhD graduate in Electrical Engineering from Stanford,joined Tesla's Autopilot team last year after CEO Eon Musk called for "hardcore software engineers" to join the company's effort to make the next generation of Autopilot fully autonomous. Now he leaves the automaker only 5 months later to join Baidu's autonomous driving team as a'Software Architect'.

The World Economic Forum published a paper this week titled "The Future of Jobs," in which it predicts the "Fourth Industrial Revolution." This revolution will consist of robots--such as 3-D printing machine, biotech and nanotechnology--replacing human jobs. . WEF's report introduces several new statistics, but the most startling is the one on robot-induced unemployment. It is estimated that technology could eliminate 5.1 million jobs by 2020. There have already been some companies that are using robots to guide people, teach and even serve.

Poacher hunters follow a path created by PAWS, an AI-driven app. Humans tend to do pretty terrible things to the environment. And those who go about illegally killing animals and cutting down trees are downright criminal, and can be difficult to stop. So, the National Science Foundation has turned to artificial intelligence to help out. It's not the only time we've turned to technology to help fight poachers.

A century ago, more than 60,000 tigers roamed the wild. Today, the worldwide estimate has dwindled to around 3,200. Poaching is one of the main drivers of this precipitous drop. Whether killed for skins, medicine or trophy hunting, humans have pushed tigers to near-extinction. The same applies to other large animal species like elephants and rhinoceros that play unique and crucial roles in the ecosystems where they live.

Wearing black headsets with tentacle-like sensors stretched over their foreheads, the competitors stare at cubes floating on computer screens as their small white drones prepare for takeoff. Some struggle to move even a few feet, while others zip confidently across the finish line. The competition -- billed as the world's first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface -- involved 16 pilots using willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard dash over an indoor basketball court at the University of Florida this past weekend. The Associated Press was there to record the event, which organizers hope to make an annual inter-collegiate spectacle, involving ever-more dynamic moves and challenges and a trophy that puts the brain on a pedestal. "With events like this, we're popularizing the use of BCI instead of it being stuck in the research lab," said Chris Crawford, a PhD student in human-centered computing.