An asteroid as big as a 10-story building has passed by Earth at a distance half that of the Moon, researchers have revealed. The asteroid, dubbed 2017 AG13, was only spotted only Saturday by the University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey. It is between 50 and 111 feet (15 to 34 meters) long, and when it passed by Earth, 2017 AG3 was moving at 9.9 miles per second (16 kilometers per second). Here, it is so close to Earth its text is almost unreadable. According to an asteroid-impact simulator called'Impact Earth!' by Purdue University, if a porous rock asteroid of 111 feet (34 meters) long hit Earth at a 45-degree angle, the simulator found, it would have exploded as an air burst.

The development of self-driving, or autonomous, vehicles is accelerating. Here's how they could affect consumers and companies. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) represent a major innovation for the automotive industry, but their potential impact with respect to timing, uptake, and penetration remains hazy. While high levels of uncertainty currently surround the issue, the ultimate role that AVs could play regarding the economy, mobility, and society as a whole could be profound. In an effort to look beyond today's rapidly changing predictions on AV penetration, we interviewed more than 30 experts across Europe, the United States, and Asia and combined these findings with our insights to arrive at ten thought-provoking potential implications of self-driving cars. The widespread use of AVs could profoundly affect a variety of industry sectors.

Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company's popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination. Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post. First, he compared a few sentences from two published versions of "The Great Gatsby," Takashi Nozaki's 1957 translation and Haruki Murakami's more recent iteration, with what this new Google Translate was able to produce. Murakami's translation is written "in very polished Japanese," Rekimoto explained to me later via email, but the prose is distinctively "Murakami-style."

The odds are high, according to recent economic analyses. Indeed, fully 47 percent of all U.S. jobs will be automated "in a decade or two," as the tech-employment scholars Carl Frey and Michael Osborne have predicted. That's because artificial intelligence and robotics are becoming so good that nearly any routine task could soon be automated. Robots and AI are already whisking products around Amazon's huge shipping centers, diagnosing lung cancer more accurately than humans and writing sports stories for newspapers. Last year in Pittsburgh, Uber put its first-ever self-driving cars into its fleet: Order an Uber and the one that rolls up might have no human hands on the wheel at all. Meanwhile, Uber's "Otto" program is installing AI in 16-wheeler trucks--a trend that could eventually replace most or all 1.7 million drivers, an enormous employment category.

Jack Clark and I are both lapsed technology journalists, and he writes one of my favorite new newsletters of this year, Import AI, which summarizes major research, hires and products in the space. He now works for OpenAI, alongside a team of researchers, where he handles policy, communications and partnerships. OpenAI is an AI research lab set up by former Stripe CTO Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman. Its mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. Q: Before you joined OpenAI, you were a journalist -- like me. In fact, you called yourself the world's first and "only neural network reporter" while you were at Bloomberg. What made you decide to cross over? I think there are three things that are going to affect the world in incredibly significant ways over the next decade and they are 1) Climate change 2) CRISPR and 3) artificial intelligence.

There's a reason Nvidia's stock price soared to an all-time high in December and has experienced a meteoric rise of just shy of 80 percent since November. Part of the company's success can be attributed to its strong execution in design and delivery of its core GPU products in the key markets of gaming, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and the data center, of course. However, the company's vision and its ability to execute on that vision all starts with very strong leadership from its CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang. At last week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Huang and Nvidia were invited to deliver the opening keynote for the show and the characteristically polished and poised CEO offered an impressive dog-and-pony of the company's key technologies and IP, supported by industry partner demonstrations. Of course gaming was one of the cornerstones of Huang's pitch, and with north of a $100 billion dollar market opportunity behind it in 2017, that stands to reason.

Patient Number Two was born to first-time parents, late 20s, white. The pregnancy was normal and the birth uncomplicated. But after a few months, it became clear something was wrong. The child had ear infection after ear infection and trouble breathing at night. He was small for his age, and by his fifth birthday, still hadn't spoken.

He is a German computer scientist and artist known for his work on machine learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), artificial neural networks, digital physics, and low-complexity art. "We need to be super careful with artificial intelligence. It is potentially more dangerous than nukes." That was Elon Musk two years ago, on Twitter. What does it mean for a technology, when it faces serious doubts from a man who is passionate about creating a better world through innovation? Since its beginnings in the 1950s, artificial intelligence has been a favourite subject of science fiction. But now AI has entered the realm of fact: several studies predict that intelligent machines will have a big impact on how we work, how we move and even how wars are fought. Innovators and scientists around the world believe that now is the time to ensure that AI is beneficial above all for humans. And even if there are plausible reasons to be anxious about machines that could one day be more intelligent than we are, many scientists are ready to take up the challenge, as we explain in our feature on the following pages. Some people fret that artificial intelligence will end civilization as we know it. Others believe it can solve every problem.

Wealth and influence in the technology business have always been about gaining the upper hand in software or the machines that software ran on. Now data -- gathered in those immense pools of information that are at the heart of everything from artificial intelligence to online shopping recommendations -- is increasingly a focus of technology competition. And academics and some policy makers, especially in Europe, are considering whether big internet companies like Google and Facebook might use their data resources as a barrier to new entrants and innovation. In recent years, Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have all been targets of tax evasion, privacy or antitrust investigations. But in the coming years, who controls what data could be the next worldwide regulatory focus as governments strain to understand and sometimes rein in American tech giants.

I just came back from CES (thanks to Here for flying me over to see their work, I'll write about that soon too) and wanted to write down some thoughts I've been having over the past few months which crystallised during this trip. I'll be giving a talk tomorrow in Oslo at an event organised by Telenor which will touch some of what I'll write about here too. I've been thinking about product design. Technically I studied industrial design, graduated from a B.A.(Sc) Sp. in 2004. We were never introduced to programming, computer science principles, electronics design or prototyping and the internet was an image search tool for presentations.