One of the major trends I have been researching recently, has been the shift in interest towards Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its multiple forms and guises, and the potential it has to analyse vast quantities of data and quickly derive actionable insights. As we all know, AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning are not new. However, there has been huge investment in the space in recent years and the ability to automatically apply complex mathematical calculations to Big Data – over and over, faster and faster – is a recent development. With steady advances in digitisation and cheap computing power, no wonder people are excited about the possibilities. One of the areas of AI that gets the most attention is Deep Learning.

Welcome to the very first edition of The Morning After, Engadget's revamped newsletter. First, I'd like to congratulate you for subscribing to what is undoubtedly the greatest newsletter you'll ever read. Thanks are also in order for giving us some of your precious inbox real estate each day. You're hearing from me, Editor in Chief Michael Gorman, because this is the Weekend Edition -- in which I'll be putting context around the most interesting and important stories we published over the past week. Come Monday at 6 AM ET, and every weekday after, the daily version will hit your inbox with summaries of the biggest stories from the previous day, delivered with Engadget's trademark wit and insight.

Picture a self-driving car that sees a pedestrian in the road and has to swerve to avoid them. Now imagine there are cyclists on both sides of the car – and only the one on the right is wearing a helmet. Should the car veer right, to avoid killing the unprotected rider, even if that means punishing safer cycling? "At least since Socrates we've been worrying about moral philosophy and how to describe what's right and what's wrong," he says. "Now suddenly we've got to programme this into artificial systems and it's like, damn, we haven't got very far."

The UK is about to further boost its status as a world leading centre for artificial intelligence (AI) with the launch of a new centre in Cambridge which is set to explore the implications the technology holds for humans. Officially opened by Professor Stephen Hawking on Wednesday, the 10m Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) will bring together top researchers from across computer science, philosophy, social sciences and other disciplines such as law and politics to explore the development of AI and both the opportunities and challenges it brings. Read more: Quiz: Who said it - real Trump or robot Trump? "Success in creating AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation," said Hawking. "But it could also be the last – unless we learn how to avoid the risks. Alongside the benefits, AI will also bring dangers like powerful autonomous weapons or new ways for the few to oppress the many. We cannot predict what we might achieve when our own minds are amplified by AI. Perhaps with the tools of this new technological revolution, we will be able to undo some of the damage done to the natural world by the last one – industrialisation."

In recent years, Hawking has issued some rather apocalyptic warnings about artificial intelligence. "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," he told the BBC in 2014. So when the world's most famous scientist praised the opening of a new A.I. research center earlier this week, the Earth wobbled slightly as a million heads turned at once. On Wednesday, Hawking spoke at the official opening of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) at Cambridge University. While Hawking tempered the rather dire tone of his previous conjecture on A.I., he didn't mince his words, either.

These days you tend to hear about Russia in terms of its government hacking the US election. But some canny Russian developers have put their skills to something more productive: monitoring the TV appearances of world leaders. A team of Russian developers have released an AI powered algorithm that tracks all world leaders activities in all media. Based on the information the Verso service analyzes the impact of each President/Prime Minister and shows a rating for them in real-time. Once a second the Verso platform takes a screenshot of a set of monitored TC channels.

Machines have never replaced humans before, and they probably aren't doing so right now, argues Noah Smith Of all the economic questions being debated today, the most frightening one is, "Will the robots take our jobs?" This nightmare scenario comes in several flavors. The extreme version is that automation simply makes human workers obsolete, just as cars made horses redundant. A less apocalyptic possibility is what economists call "skill-biased technological change" -- people who are technically savvy, mentally flexible and educated will reap greater and greater rewards, while everyone else sees their wages decline. These two scenarios might look different on paper, but the net result is largely the same -- a very big portion of humanity would be either be impoverished or reduced to living off of the government dole.

On this week's Tech Tent - your weekly status update on the technology business - we have three stories reflecting our current anxieties about the nature of our digital world. We'll discuss the biggest cybersecurity threat of the moment, the use of bots in the fight to get the upper hand on social media during the US elections and the ongoing debate about the risks of artificial intelligence. This week, producer Jat Gill and I attended a demo by security firm Sophos which left us both rather scared. James Lyne from the firm played a bad guy launching an attack on a company, while two colleagues played the increasingly confused system administrators trying to work out what was going on as chaos engulfed the network. We then heard that the principle weapon in the attackers' armoury was now ransomware.

If you want to explore coding with Lego bricks, there's one major option: to use a kit from the company's well-known Mindstorms robotics line. Mindstorms-based machines are built around the Intelligent Brick, which can be programmed using Lego's graphical programming environment or one of a number of third-party alternative languages. But Lego also makes a collection of motors, connectors, lights, and infrared receivers collectively sold under the label of Power Functions. In place of a programmable brick, the Power Function line includes a handheld controller for transmitting command signals. I wondered if it was possible to use a Raspberry Pi to replace the handheld controller, taking on the role of an Intelligent Brick.

This post is by Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President of the Data Group at Microsoft. We are only 6 days away from PASS Summit 2016 (@sqlpass) which kicks off next Wednesday, October 26th, in Seattle. SQL PASS Summit (#SQLSummit, #sqlpass) is the world's largest and most intensive technical training conference for Microsoft SQL Server (@SQLServer) and BI professionals. But more than that, it's a conference – planned and presented by the SQL Server community for the SQL Server community (#sqlfamily). It has the most technical sessions, the largest number of attendees, the best networking, and the highest-rated sessions and speakers of any SQL Server event in the world.