SpaceX launched a Japanese commercial communications satellite Saturday night. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 10:26 p.m. PT from Cape Canaveral, Fla., carrying the JCSAT-16 satellite into a geosynchronous transfer orbit. At 10:40 p.m., the first stage landed on a platform floating several hundred miles off the Florida coast. The secondary objective of landing the first stage of Falcon 9 on the drone ship -- named Of Course I Still Love You -- is key to the SpaceX mission of reusing rockets. The satellite, operated by SKY Perfect JSAT Corp., will serve as a backup transmitter for the rest of the communications company's satellite fleet.

The market is a massive, irrational, and fluid amalgamation of all information available in the public domain, at least according to the efficient market hypothesis. The famous quote, that "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent," holds significance, because it illustrates the perpetual struggle that we face in trying to understand its inner machinations. The market is both a byproduct of human innovation, as well as a microcosm of the world we live in. Just as we can't definitively know how the market will move, we can't definitively know how the choices we make will affect the world we live in. Therein lays the real challenge, in which we take everything we think we know and make an analytical decision, because afterward all that is left is to wait and see if it was the right call.

Drone safety, from privacy issues to crashing over unsuspecting pedestrians, has been a concern since, well, the dawn of the drone. But one startup is working to use artificial intelligence to help drone pilots pick the safest route. Flock, an artificial intelligence company formed out of Imperial College London, Oxford University and Cambridge University, is currently developing a risk analysis program for commercial drones, from aerial photographers to drone use on a larger scale, such as delivering Amazon packages. The program uses real-time weather information and the location of buildings. But what's perhaps even more impressive is that the system can also predict what areas will be full of people so it can choose a route around congested areas or a time when those areas will be less crowded.

In the world of machine learning, deep learning neural networks (DLNN) is the fastest growing field. World Scientific's latest book "Deep Learning Neural Networks: Design and Case Studies" shows how DLNN can be a powerful computational tool for solving prediction, diagnosis, detection and decision problems based on a well-defined computational architecture. The applications in this field serve as a major decision tool in Big Data applications. DLNN successfully applied to a broad field of applications ranging from computer security, speech recognition, image and video recognition to industrial fault detection, medical diagnostics and finance. Their range of applications covers almost any problem whose input data, performance evaluation and target decision can be numerically expressed.

Artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence after 2020, predicts Vernor Vinge, a world-renowned pioneer in AI, who has warned about the risks and opportunities that an electronic super-intelligence would offer to mankind. "It seems plausible that with technology we can, in the fairly near future," says scifi legend Vernor Vinge, "create (or become) creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond such an event -- such a singularity -- are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm." There was the psychotic HAL 9000 in "2001: A Space Odyssey," the humanoids which attacked their human masters in "I, Robot" and, of course, "The Terminator", where a robot is sent into the past to kill a woman whose son will end the tyranny of the machines. Experts interviewed by AFP were divided.

Some economists are also worried future economies will consist of low-skilled jobs that are not profitable to automate and high-skilled jobs that complement new technologies. The losers will be a widening swathe of middle-skilled workers. Because the trajectory of future technology is unpredictable, the exact impact on jobs is rather unclear. A much cited study by researchers at Oxford University found that 47pc of jobs in the US could become automated in the next 20 years. Yet a recent OECD paper* found (more plausibly, in this columnist's view) that 9pc of jobs at highrisk of being automated. The figure for Ireland was even lower, at 8pc.

JUDY WOODRUFF: In the day's other news: The Pentagon confirms tonight that a U.S. drone attack has killed a top Islamic State leader in Afghanistan. Hafiz Saeed Khan died in a strike on July 26. The State Department designated him a global terrorist last year. Bombings rocked across towns in Southern Thailand today, killing at least four people and wounding dozens more. Coordinated attacks hit six sites, including the popular island of Phuket.

U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speaks at Futuramic Tool & Engineering in Warren, Michigan August 11, 2016. WASHINGTON -- Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton spelled out their economic visions in high-profile speeches in Michigan this week. They delved into taxes and regulations, trade deals and job growth. Mostly unmentioned were major challenges that have slowed the U.S. economy and made good-paying jobs harder to find, particularly in struggling pockets of the country. Automation and increasingly high-skilled jobs that require technological know-how that many people lack. They are problems that analysts say require a transformative vision.

Letting a snake-like robot glide into your mouth and down your throat may sound a bit alarming. Letting such a robot glide into any of your other orifices may sound more alarming still. But the Flex Robotic System from Medrobotics, in Raynham, Mass., has earned high praise from a head and neck surgeon who has sent it snaking down 19 of his patients' throats as of today. "It really is changing the way I do business," says David Goldenberg, director of otolaryngology surgery at the Penn State Hershey Medical Center. "It is the future of head and neck surgery."

Whether or not it's a realistic or practical or good idea, urban commercial drone delivery is grinding remorselessly toward a thing that is going to happen. For many companies, "grind" is the right word, especially if they're trying to do research and development in the United States, where regulations tend to be overly cumbersome and inflexible. To help move things along a bit, Amazon has decided to take its next phase of delivery drone testing to the United Kingdom. Here's the stuff worth caring about from the press release, which amounts to about a third of the press release. In other words, it's relatively informative, as press releases go: Amazon has today announced a partnership with the UK Government to explore the steps needed to make the delivery of parcels by small drones a reality, allowing Amazon to trial new methods of testing its delivery systems.