A prototype autonomous ship known as the Medium Displacement Unmanned Surface Vehicle (MDUSV) has officially been transferred to the U.S. Navy from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) after a two-year testing and evaluation program. Named "Sea Hunter," the Office of Naval Research will continue to develop the vessel from this point forward. Although there's no specific timetable for when the Sea Hunter would join active naval operations, the statement from DARPA indicated that it could happen as early as this year. The anti-submarine warfare vessel could be the first of an entirely new class of warship. "[Sea Hunter] represents a new vision of naval surface warfare that trades small numbers of very capable, high-value assets for large numbers of commoditized, simpler platforms that are more capable in the aggregate," said Fred Kennedy of DARPA.

Stuart Russell, Anthony Aguirre, Ariel Conn, and Max Tegmark recently wrote a response to my critique of their "Slaughterbots" video on autonomous weapons. I am grateful for their thoughtful article. I think this kind of dialogue can be incredibly helpful in illuminating points of disagreement on various issues, and I welcome the exchange. I think it is particularly important to have a cross-disciplinary dialogue on autonomous weapons that includes roboticists, AI scientists, engineers, ethicists, lawyers, human rights advocates, military professionals, political scientists, and other perspectives because this issue touches so many disciplines. I appreciate their thorough, point-by-point reply.

WASHINGTON – As bad as President Donald Trump describes U.S.-Pakistani ties today, they can get far worse. Over 16 years that included hundreds of deadly U.S. drone strikes, Osama bin Laden's killing on Pakistani soil and accusations Pakistan helps insurgents that kill Americans, the reluctant allies never reached one point of no return: Pakistan closing the air routes to Afghanistan. It could also be tantamount to Pakistan going to war with the United States. Even if such a step is seen as unlikely by most officials and observers, Pakistan's ability to shape the destiny of America's longest war is a reminder of how much leverage the country maintains at a time Trump is suspending hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance. "There's some suggestion that we have all of the cards in our hands," said Richard Olson, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan.

The mystery surrounding the fate of a secret military satellite deepened today when the Pentagon refused to answer even simple questions about whether the mission to launch it had gone awry. On Sunday, private space firm SpaceX blasted a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida carrying the secret government satellite, known as Zuma. US media this week reported that the billion-dollar payload did not make it into orbit and was presumed to have been lost. SpaceX said Tuesday that the rocket worked fine, but its statement left open the possibility that something could have gone wrong after the launch. A top secret billion-dollar spy satellite plummeted into the Indian Ocean after a botched SpaceX mission over the weekend, but Elon Musk's company has insisted they are not to blame.

A top secret billion-dollar spy satellite plummeted into the Indian Ocean after a SpaceX mission over the weekend, but Elon Musk's company has insisted they are not to blame. The satellite, codenamed Zuma, launched from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida Sunday night, but it reportedly failed to remain in orbit, officials said Wednesday. The highly classified satellite launched by ended up plummeting into the Indian Ocean, a U.S. official confirmed to ABC News. A top secret billion-dollar spy satellite plummeted into the Indian Ocean after a botched SpaceX mission over the weekend, but Elon Musk's company has insisted they are not to blame. Lawmakers and congressional staffers from the Senate and the House have been briefed about the botched mission, some of the officials told the Wall Street Journal.

When artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on jobs and the economy comes up, the conversation centers on blue collar jobs. Per The State of Automation Report, there are 4.6M such jobs at risk in the USA due to AI. But, the jobs of MBAs and their white-collar brethren will also be impacted dramatically by AI. A growing wave of AI-infused Expert Automation & Augmentation Software (EAAS, pronounced /ēz/) platforms will usher in a new era of AI-assisted or AI-enhanced productivity. This AI-enhanced productivity is threatening jobs at the lower end of the white-collar spectrum as evidenced by these recent headlines. But to start, Expert Automation & Augmentation Software will be more focused on augmentation, i.e., helping humans do countless complex tasks that are either beyond human cognition and/or inefficient for human beings to do (read thousands of pages of patents and understand key topics). Think of these AI-enhanced assistants as junior analysts (lawyers, journalists, etc) who never tire and who can process information beyond human capacity but who will still need the steady eye of a manager to make subjective judgments.

Apple and Amazon are in licensing discussions with Riyadh on investing in Saudi Arabia, sources claim. The move is part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's push to give the conservative kingdom a high-tech look. A third source confirmed to Reuters that Apple was in talks with SAGIA, Saudi Arabia's foreign investment authority. Both companies already sell products in Saudi Arabia via third parties but they and other global tech giants have yet to establish a direct presence. Apple and Amazon are in licensing discussions with Riyadh on investing in Saudi Arabia, sources claim.

The rhopoema nomadica, or nomadic jellyfish, is native to the Indian Ocean but in the eighties, they started turning up in the eastern Mediterranean, presumably through the Suez Canal. Now this jellyfish forms massive plumes, kilometers wide, along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean and Israel. For the first time, recently, a huge plume formed off Egypt's coast, and off Turkey and Lebanon. When it blooms intensely, it can get sucked into the watering systems that power plants use to cool machinery. Jellyfish are gooey, like a sink stopper, and clog the intake systems, so they have to shut down power plants until they can clear the bloom away.

The Whittle likelihood is a widely used and computationally efficient pseudo-likelihood. However, it is known to produce biased parameter estimates for large classes of models. We propose a method for de-biasing Whittle estimates for second-order stationary stochastic processes. The de-biased Whittle likelihood can be computed in the same $\mathcal{O}(n\log n)$ operations as the standard approach. We demonstrate the superior performance of the method in simulation studies and in application to a large-scale oceanographic dataset, where in both cases the de-biased approach reduces bias by up to two orders of magnitude, achieving estimates that are close to exact maximum likelihood, at a fraction of the computational cost. We prove that the method yields estimates that are consistent at an optimal convergence rate of $n^{-1/2}$, under weaker assumptions than standard theory, where we do not require that the power spectral density is continuous in frequency. We describe how the method can be easily combined with standard methods of bias reduction, such as tapering and differencing, to further reduce bias in parameter estimates.

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA – Astronauts got a mouth-watering haul with Tuesday's Earth-to-space delivery -- pizza and ice cream. A commercial supply ship arrived at the International Space Station two days after launching from Virginia. Besides NASA equipment and experiments, the Orbital ATK capsule holds chocolate and vanilla ice cream for the six station astronauts, as well as make-your-own flatbread pizzas. Astronauts always crave pizza in orbit, but it's been particularly tough for Italy's Paolo Nespoli. He's been up there since July and has another month to go. Nespoli used the space station's robot arm to grab the cargo ship, as they zoomed 260 miles above the Indian Ocean.