On a velvety March evening in Mandeville Canyon, high above the rest of Los Angeles, Norman Lear's living room was jammed with powerful people eager to learn the secrets of longevity. When the symposium's first speaker asked how many people there wanted to live to two hundred, if they could remain healthy, almost every hand went up. The venture capitalists were keeping slim to maintain their imposing vitality, the scientists were keeping slim because they'd read--and in some cases done--the research on caloric restriction, and the Hollywood stars were keeping slim because of course. When Liz Blackburn, who won a Nobel Prize for her work in genetics, took questions, Goldie Hawn, regal on a comfy sofa, purred, "I have a question about the mitochondria. I've been told about a molecule called glutathione that helps the health of the cell?" Glutathione is a powerful antioxidant that protects cells and their mitochondria, which provide energy; some in Hollywood call it "the God molecule." But taken in excess it can muffle a number of bodily repair mechanisms, leading to liver and kidney problems or even the rapid and potentially fatal sloughing of your skin. Blackburn gently suggested that a varied, healthy diet was best, and that no single molecule was the answer to the puzzle of aging. Yet the premise of the evening was that answers, and maybe even an encompassing solution, were just around the corner. The party was the kickoff event for the National Academy of Medicine's Grand Challenge in Healthy Longevity, which will award at least twenty-five million dollars for breakthroughs in the field. Victor Dzau, the academy's president, stood to acknowledge several of the scientists in the room. He praised their work with enzymes that help regulate aging; with teasing out genes that control life span in various dog breeds; and with a technique by which an old mouse is surgically connected to a young mouse, shares its blood, and within weeks becomes younger. Joon Yun, a doctor who runs a health-care hedge fund, announced that he and his wife had given the first two million dollars toward funding the challenge. "I have the idea that aging is plastic, that it's encoded," he said. "If something is encoded, you can crack the code." To growing applause, he went on, "If you can crack the code, you can hack the code!" It's a big ask: more than a hundred and fifty thousand people die every day, the majority of aging-related diseases. Yet Yun believes, he told me, that if we hack the code correctly, "thermodynamically, there should be no reason we can't defer entropy indefinitely. We can end aging forever." Nicole Shanahan, the founder of a patent-management business, announced that her company would oversee longevity-related patents that Yun had pledged to the cause.

The height of individual vs. collective irrationality has to be automobile traffic. We build roadways around the assumption that we as individual human actors will behave in ways that appear to reward those behaviors at the level of individuals but wind up harming the collective's goal of moving many cars through a limited amount of space as quickly as possible. Witness how a single greedy merge, for example, can send out a cascade of brake lights leading to a further wave of merges, some of which will themselves be greedy (careless). There really is no truly individual behavior in traffic and yet people are people. Fixing this is among the promises of driverless cars.

That gnawing neediness in my soul explains why I was intrigued by Post Intelligence, a startup with a deep learning algorithm that can supposedly make you better at social media. For now, Post Intelligence works with both Twitter and Facebook, but there's potential for it to engage with several other platforms in the future. The algorithm is the brainchild of Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan, two former Google product managers. Reddy can count Blogger, Google Video and Google on her record, while Sundararajan helped develop Gmail and AdSense. Together, they previously founded media agency MyLikes and Candid, a Secret-esque anonymous network.

Police body cameras are widely seen as a way to improve law enforcement's transparency with the public. But when mixed with police use of facial-recognition tools, the prospect of continual surveillance comes with big risks to privacy. Facial-recognition technology combined with policy body cameras could "redefine the nature of public spaces," Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology, told the US House Oversight Committee at a hearing on March 22. It's not a distant reality and it threatens civil liberties, he warned. Technologists already have tools, and are developing more, that allow police to recognize people in real time. Of 38 manufacturers who make 66 different products, at least nine already have facial recognition technology capabilities or have made accommodations to build it in, according to a 2016 Johns Hopkins University report, created for the US Department of Justice, on the body-worn camera market.

Despite his own role in the advancement of artificial intelligence, Elon Musk has long warned that the technology built by humans could one day lead to our destruction. And, the tech giant has now revealed he's kept a'wary eye' on the growth of AI for years as an investor in DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014. While humans may be able to stop a runaway algorithm, there would be'no stopping' a large, centralized AI that calls the shots, Musk argues in a recent interview with Vanity Fair. Despite his own role in the advancement of artificial intelligence, Elon Musk has long warned that the technology built by humans could one day lead to our destruction. And, the tech giant has revealed he's kept a'wary eye' on the growth of AI for years as an investor in DeepMind Last summer, when asked at the Code Conference in southern California if the answer to the question of whether we are in a simulated computer game was'yes', Elon Musk said the answer is'probably'.

President Trump's effort to keep manufacturers in the U.S. may encourage increased automation -- potentially at the expense of human workers. However, the robots are likely to be made in China unless the U.S. acts soon. The Chinese government is investing billions of dollars to take the global lead in robotics and AI. In its most recent five-year plan, the national government aimed to boost annual production of industrial robots to 100,000 by 2020 -- and is poised to exceed that target. China has also surpassed the U.S. in the number of scientific papers produced on AI and is deploying machine learning and robotics across industries as well as the military.

Thirty-eight percent of jobs in the U.S. are at high risk of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence over the next 15 years, according to a new report by PwC. Meanwhile, only 30% of jobs in the U.K. are similarly endangered. The same level of risk applies to only 21% of positions in Japan. The U.S. and U.K. labor markets are both dominated by services jobs, and roughly the same share of workers are employed in key sectors including finance, transportation, education, manufacturing and food services. But PwC found major differences in the nature of the work done within these sectors that explains why more U.S. jobs are at risk.

That gnawing neediness in my soul explains why I was intrigued by Post Intelligence, a startup with a deep learning algorithm that can supposedly make you better at social media. For now, Post Intelligence works with both Twitter and Facebook, but there's potential for it to engage with several other platforms in the future. The algorithm is the brainchild of Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan, two former Google product managers. Reddy can count Blogger, Google Video and Google on her record, while Sundararajan helped develop Gmail and AdSense. Together, they previously founded media agency MyLikes and Candid, a Secret-esque anonymous network.

When the two students decided to start a company, they knew that they wanted it to be big -- really big. "The sky is the limit," says Ennslen today, seven years later. And there's still room to grow. They recently moved their company, Synapticon, and its 45 employees to new headquarters in a nondescript building in Schönaich outside Stuttgart. There, they develop intelligent control systems for robots.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd has criticised WhatsApp's use of encryption to protects its users' communications, in the wake of the Westminster terror attack. It has emerged that the attacker, Khalid Masood, sent a WhatsApp message moments before launching his assault, and Ms Rudd accused the Facebook-owned app of providing terrorists with a place to "hide". In the government's line of fire is end-to-end encryption, a security technique designed to keep users' data private, which Ms Rudd described as "completely unacceptable" while speaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show. WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption to all of its messages in April 2016, enabling it by default on all conversations. "From now on when you and your contacts use the latest version of the app, every call you make, and every message, photo, video, file, and voice message you send, is end-to-end encrypted by default, including group chats," it said at the time.