Technological revolutions have long animated economic history. The concept of "creative destruction"--in which technological advancement destroys certain sectors of the economy while giving rise to new ones--has roots in some of the earliest economic thought.1 This process hinges on the idea that machines serve to supplement human labor, primarily labor dedicated to repetitive physical and cognitive tasks. At the moment, machines can solve intensive well-defined tasks but for the most part cannot be expected to define problems nor identify and traverse particularly complex systems without human oversight. Robots: A Retrospective The most primitive economies are essentially brawn-based. Human labor is largely priced by the ability to perform physical tasks associated with farming and building. A number of studies (e.g., Thomas and Strauss, 1997) show how in modern-day less-developed economies, men make more than woman as a function of body mass and thus perceived brawn, and that men with more brawn made more than those with less.

Tesla makes the world's best electric cars - but they're not content to rest on their laurels. The company just launched a powerful new battery that makes the Model S the fastest production car you can actually buy. Meanwhile, autonomous vehicle startup nuTonomy has beat Uber to the punch by launching the world's first fleet of self-driving taxis in Singapore. The MIT Climate CoLab awarded honors to a new elevated Caterpillar Train that soars over traffic jams. And in Europe, Paris is planning to go completely car-free for an entire day this September, and we spotted an awesome pedal-powered school bus on the streets of the Netherlands.

Famous Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, who is credited as the author of the famous war strategy guidebook Art of War had said; "know thy self, know thy enemy. Those words were from the 5th century BC. The'art of war' in the 21st century is drastically different. So much so that Christopher Coker, professor at the London School of Economics and author of Warrior Geeks in a 2013 piece declared that technology, in fact, is now making man the weakest link in warfare. India is also now looking to get into the world of advanced drone warfare. New Delhi has shown renewed interest in buying some of the top US-made drones currently proving their worth for the American military around the world.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Lionfish have voracious appetites that are upsetting coral reef ecosystems from Rhode Island to Venezuela. But a new nonprofit company has an unusual plan to restore balance to those environments before it's too late. In the latest edition of our online series "ScienceScope," science producer Nsikan Akpan has the scoop. NSIKAN AKPAN: The lionfish is an invasive species. In its native home of the Indo-Pacific, the lionfish is a fierce, unrelenting predator.

Weather Underground makes weather forecasts based on 8,000 public and 192,000 privately constructed weather stations across 195 countries. The company is adding 400 new stations across Asia, South America, and Africa, and it'll be integrating all of them with IBM's Watson language-learning AI (the one that played Jeopardy! So what exactly does this mean? It is creating a global weather forecast system tied into a number of worldwide businesses, and with that, a hope to outmaneuver one of the most costly, damaging variables in global industry--weather. When IBM bought The Weather Company/WU last October it immediately announced its intention to merge WU's 200,000 weather stations with Watson through the Internet of Things.

A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one- or two-gram shaped charge. You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: "Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target." A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone's head. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don't have to be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target. There will be manufacturers producing millions of these weapons that people will be able to buy just like you can buy guns now, except millions of guns don't matter unless you have a million soldiers. You need only three guys to write the program and launch them. So you can just imagine that in many parts of the world humans will be hunted. They will be cowering underground in shelters and devising techniques so that they don't get detected. This is the ever-present cloud of lethal autonomous weapons. Mary Wareham laughs a lot. It usually sounds the same regardless of the circumstance -- like a mirthful giggle the blonde New Zealander can't suppress -- but it bubbles up at the most varied moments. Wareham laughs when things are funny, she laughs when things are awkward, she laughs when she disagrees with you. And she laughs when things are truly unpleasant, like when you're talking to her about how humanity might soon be annihilated by killer robots and the world is doing nothing to stop it. One afternoon this spring at the United Nations in Geneva, I sat behind Wareham in a large wood-paneled, beige-carpeted assembly room that hosted the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), a group of 121 countries that have signed the agreement to restrict weapons that "are considered to cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants or to affect civilians indiscriminately"-- in other words, weapons humanity deems too cruel to use in war. The UN moves at a glacial pace, but the CCW is even worse.

An "AI writing robot" produced up to 58 articles per day for a Chinese publication at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro this month. The Xiaomingbot wrote reports for the news syndication service Toutiao, delivering news items within two minutes of events ending. During the two weeks of the Olympics, the robot reporter produced a total of 450 stories. Xiaomingbot is not the first artificial intelligence (AI) reporter, though the quantity of reports makes it arguably the most prolific. The articles--ranging from around 100 words to 821 articles--appear to have been well received by readers, though some comments seen by Quartz reportedly claimed the prose was "too robotic."

In this special guest feature, Cecilia Pizzurro, Senior Director, Strategic Data Projects at LOGICnow, discusses the convergence of data/machine learning and cybersecurity, and the idea that these two are playing off of each other in a more meaningful way than ever before. Cecilia leads a team of data scientists and software engineers in Cambridge (US) and Newcastle (UK). These teams use machine learning and big data analytics to find business value in the vast amount of customer data gathered from LOGICnow's products. She was also the co-founder and CTO of the The Dolomite Group, a South American mining consortium, pioneering machine learning and big data analyses to improve mining efficiency and reduce environmental impact in Peru. This company is currently finalizing its acquisition by a Chilean mining company.

Why can't computers watch the Earth from above and automatically map our roads, buildings, and trash heaps? Satellite operator DigitalGlobe is teaming up with Amazon, the venture arm of the CIA, and chipmaker Nvidia to try to make it happen. In a joint project, DigitalGlobe today released satellite imagery depicting the whole of Rio de Janeiro to a resolution of 50 centimeters. The outlines of 200,000 buildings inside the city's roughly 1,900 square kilometers have been manually marked on the photos. The SpaceNet data set, as it is called, is intended to spark efforts to train machine-learning algorithms to interpret high-resolution satellite photos by themselves.

A consortium of companies, including DigitalGlobe, CosmiQ Works and NVIDIA, today launched SpaceNet, an open-data initiative aimed at improving image analysis tools. The data are being hosted by Amazon Web Services as part of a partnership. With an increase in the number of CubeSats, high-resolution satellites and drones of every shape and size, we have accumulated petabytes of imagining data that can be processed with analytics to solve myriad problems. DigitalGlobe, which operates imaging satellites, has built out partnerships with companies like Facebook to target rural villages with internet access using photography as a guide. Satellite imaging has also been analyzed to help the Navy find Somali pirates, crowdsource the hunt for Malaysia Airlines flight 370 and identify deforestation zones.