Two years after World War II, billionaire Howard Hughes personally piloted his "Spruce Goose" troop transport aircraft on the first and only flight of the largest seaplane ever built. It lasted barely a minute. Now, more than 70 years later, a U.S. startup is testing a new seaplane concept--one that could evolve into huge cargo drones that fly 109 metric tons of freight across the Pacific, touch down autonomously over water, and unload at ports around the world. The startup Natilus was founded in 2014 with a dream of building large cargo drones to deliver international freight for about half the price of piloted aircraft, and much faster than ships. In December, Natilus planned to test the water-taxiing capabilities of a small prototype drone with a 9-meter wingspan in San Francisco Bay.

Tensions between poachers and conservationists in the Gulf of California escalated over the weekend after a fisherman shot down a drone being used to monitor illegal activities. The drone belonged to the U.S. conservation group Sea Shepherd, which has two ships in the northern part of the Sea of Cortez as part of an effort to save the critically endangered vaquita porpoise. The vaquita have been inadvertently caught in nets that poachers use to catch the endangered totoaba fish. Fishermen can make huge sums on the black market for dried totoaba swim bladders, which are sold in China for their supposed medicinal properties. The environmental group has been searching for nets and pulling them from the water.

Over the past few weeks Fortune colleagues and I have written at length about China's rise as an "innovation superpower," particularly in sectors involving the Internet, e-commerce and mobile payment. We've marveled at the scale of China's two largest tech giants, Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings, and extolled the creativity and convenience of the multitude of the services they offer. Some of you have written to remind us of Beijing's strict censorship of the Internet. Even so, my view remains that China has emerged as the biggest, liveliest and most sophisticated digital marketplace in the world. But I've also expressed unease in this space about the fact that in China's tech sector, even more than in America's, an enormous amount of market power is concentrated in the hands of a few giant firms, with few safeguards for individual privacy.

When future historians of Silicon Valley look back at 2017, they'll see a time when America's most powerful tech companies and the venture capital ecosystem that created them came under unprecedented scrutiny from politicians and the public. The region's innovation engine produced numerous technical advances, but controversy over fake news and revelations about sexual harassment of female entrepreneurs have cast a shadow over the Valley this year. Big tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area were busier than ever in 2017, and artificial intelligence was a top priority for many of them. Among a long list of AI initiatives, Google launched TensorFlow Lite, a lightweight version of its open-source machine-learning software that has accelerated AI adoption among companies. The new version enables AI to run on mobile phones and household gadgets such as fridges and speakers.

Game developers were researching AI well before it became a tech industry trend, but they haven't had much incentive to share their work with the academic world. Ubisoft, however, is trying to find a happy middle ground. It recently established an AI research wing, La Forge, that aims to harmonize research for both gaming and science. The new unit has academics and Ubisoft employees working together on projects that will ideally advance gaming and lead to real-world breakthroughs that scientists can publish. As an example, Ubisoft points to its work on creating a small-scale version of the San Francisco Bay Area for Watch Dogs 2. The company developed AI-guided cars and pedestrians to navigate a realistic urban environment, and that's potentially ideal for self-driving car research -- scientists could use Watch Dogs' technology to test autonomous driving in tricky situations (such as crowds) without having to put real cars on the road.

Stunning concept images for the world's first first floating nation have been released as part of a project bankrolled by PayPal founder Peter Thiel. The plans will see the seabound city-state, complete with a handful of hotels, homes, offices, restaurants and more, built in the Pacific Ocean off the island of Tahiti in 2020. Now, a series of computer generated graphics reveal how it might look once complete, with a design that blends futuristic technology with Polynesian traditions. Stunning concept images for the world's first first floating nation have been released as part of a project bankrolled by PayPal founder Peter Thiel. Floating islands would feature aquaculture farms, healthcare, medical research facilities, and sustainable energy powerhouses.

AI is coming for your job. AI is taking over the world. If we compiled all the headlines about artificial intelligence from the last year, we'd have a picture of a dystopian world where jobs are scarce and AI and automation rule everything we do. In this scenario, millions of people are impacted by AI and autonomous systems created with little regard for their consequences: They are deployed in unethical ways, riddled with errors and bias, and discriminatory. The obscurity of how AI works and where it's used result in fear and confusion.

As people increasingly migrate to cities in search of jobs, services, and other urban benefits, local governments are turning to emerging technologies to respond to the pressures of their growing populations. Tech-savvy "smart cities" are reacting to heightened demands on scarce resources by developing new capabilities such as artificial intelligence (AI) and sensor-driven analytics to resolve myriad challenges, from crime to congestion. The new insights that result are helping city managers look at old problems in a new light, while cloud computing is making these efforts affordable and realistic. Analytics, for example, can help cities use existing resources more efficiently, according to Joel Cherkis, a group vice president at Oracle. "Traditionally, when crime rates go up, cities hire more police," he says.

The ride-hailing company Lyft is now sending self-driving cars to pick up passengers in a Boston neighborhood. The cars will have backup human drivers at the wheel and will be limited to short routes within the city's Seaport District, a burgeoning tech startup hub. Lyft and its Boston-based partner nuTonomy, which builds self-driving software, announced Wednesday that the pilot project has begun. The Renault Zoe EVs will be limited to short routes within the city's Seaport District The cars will initially be a small number of Renault Zoe EVs, which Nutonomy began road-testing in Boston starting last November. Nutonomy engineers are already working on integrating Lyft software into'a couple of' vehicles, to be deployed sometime'in the coming months,' for actual customer pickups, though no more specific timeline was given.

LiDAR is having a moment right now helping self-driving cars and robots not hit things, but don't forget about what else it can do. In a study called The Bare Earth, scientists from the Washington Geological Survey used it to image the ground right down to dirt and rocks. Stripped of trees and other distractions, the images provide not only valuable geological survey data, but stunning, otherworldly views of our planet. The image above depicts a LiDAR relative elevation model (REM), showing current and previous channels carved out by the Sauk River in Washington State's Skagit and Snohomish counties. In the regular satellite image below, however, only the active, vegetation-free channels are clearly visible -- a striking display of what the technique can reveal.