Alex Owen-Hill is a freelance writer and blogger who writes about a large range of topics, including science, language, creativity and (of course) robotics. He completed a PhD in Telerobotics from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid as part of the PURESAFE project, in collaboration with CERN. As a recovering academic, he maintains a firm foot in the robotics world by blogging for gripper manufacturer Robotiq.

Robots have been taking our jobs since the 1960s. So why are politicians and business leaders only now becoming so worried about robots causing mass unemployment? It comes down to the question of what a robot really is. While science fiction has often portrayed robots as androids carrying out tasks in much the same way as humans do, the reality is that robots take much more specialised forms. Traditional 20th-century robots were automated machines and robotic arms building cars in factories.

Do you know what is common between San Bernardino's shooting spree and the terrorist attacks in Paris last month? Jillennials, Jihadis who are Millennials. We mine data worldwide, a lot of it, a ton of it, every day and every night, and we do this for a living at PredictifyMe. We have partnership with the United Nations to protect school-goers in Pakistan, Nigeria, Sudan and Lebanon using our proprietary software SecureSim and Soothsayer . When the Paris attacks unfolded, we asked ourselves (and our database), how can we use data sciences to prevent something like this from ever happening again. Can we find out what factors influence an otherwise ordinary citizen to become radicalized?

As they do every year, hackers descended on Las Vegas this week to show off the many ways they can decimate the internet's security systems. Here's a collection of some of our favorite talks from this week's Black Hat conference, including some we didn't get the chance to cover in depth. Before the week even began, we took a look at how $15 worth of magnets could overcome a "smart" gun's protections, turning it into just a regular ol' gun. Similarly, a popular safe turned out to be anything but against a homemade robot safecracker. Some of the popular tools hackers use to control other people's systems, which turn out to be riddled with vulnerabilities themselves. Radioactivity sensors are easy to hack and not likely to get fixed.

The dance documentary "Step" and "Hell or High Water" writer Taylor Sheridan's directorial effort "Wind River," starring Jeremy Renner, highlight limited releases. Armed Response A special-forces team investigates mysterious disappearances at an A.I.-powered top secret military compound. The Battleship Island Near the end of World War II, a Korean independence activist plots to save his countrymen imprisoned by the Japanese as slave labor on the island of Hashima. Written by Ryoo Seung-wan, Shin Kyoung-ill. Brave New Jersey Orson Welles' 1938 "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast shakes up the denizens of a New Jersey town as they unite to battle the "alien" invaders.

Any ammunition storage location, full of explosives collected in one place, makes a tempting target. For an attacker, the hard part is getting an explosive inside the perimeter to set it off. Drones are the ideal mechanism for this mayhem. Relatively cheap and expendable, a drone's major limitation is how much weight it can carry. In this case, the aerial vehicle seems to have transported a Russian-made ZMG-1 thermite grenade.

Amazon's futuristic fleet of autonomous delivery drones could be equipped with data grabbing sensors, according to a patent granted to the firm. This would allow the vehicles to scan your home at the same time as dropping off your package. The company believes this may reveal clues that could allow it recommend products for you to purchase. Some may feel uncomfortable at the prospect of arming the self-flying devices with such snooping technology, although the patent suggests it would be opt-in service. Amazon's futuristic fleet of autonomous delivery drones could be equipped with data grabbing sensors, according to a patent (pictured) granted to the firm.

Figures released last week show that Google spent a record amount of almost $6m lobbying in Washington DC in the past three months, putting the Silicon Valley behemoth on track to be the top corporate lobbying spending in the US. Last year it ranked number two, behind Comcast. Given the increased antitrust scrutiny that is coming from the Democrats' new "Better Deal" policy platform, Donald Trump's random tweets attacking fellow tech giant Amazon for its connection to the Washington Post, and his adviser Steve Bannon's recent comments that Google and Facebook should be regulated as utilities, it is likely Google will only increase its lobbying expenditure in the next few months. The largest monopoly in America, Google controls five of the top six billion-user, universal web platforms – search, video, mobile, maps and browser – and leads in 13 of the top 14 commercial web functions, according to Scott Cleland at Precursor Consulting. As the controversial Trump-supporting PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel points out, companies like Google don't like to advertise this fact.

We like our machines to feel human, even if they don't look it. The pulsing on and off of the power light on an Apple computer when it is "sleeping" is reassuring. Even the red light of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey gave an assurance that the machine was alive, rather than a faceless menace. One of the pioneers of computing, Alan Turing, was amongst the first to address the challenge of artificial intelligence and gives his name to the Turing test for a "machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human." Learning from our mistakes makes us human.

Are our machines turning into gods? Jie, the world's best player of the world's oldest board game, Go, had just met his match… in the form of a program called AlphaGo. In the space of a year, the program had become "almost like the god of Go," said Jie after losing to AlphaGo. Jie had been playing the game, viewed as too hard for machines to excel at, since he was 10. AlphaGo was only made by Google's parent, Alphabet, in 2014.