In the first decades of the 20th century, people around the world began succumbing to an entirely new cause of mortality. These new deaths, due to the dangers of the automobile, soon became accepted as a lamentable but normal part of modern life. A hundred years later, with 1.25 million people worldwide (about 30,000 in the U.S.) being killed every year in road crashes, there's now an effort to reject the perception that these deaths are normal or acceptable. As reported in a recent New York Times article, a growing number of safety advocates, government officials, and journalists are moving away from the phrase "car accident" on the grounds that it presumes that the drivers involved are blameless--a presumption that is correct only 6 percent of the time, according to a report by the U.S. Department of Transportation. The vast majority of such incidents are caused by drivers who make mistakes, take risks, or drive while distracted or impaired.

The robot was used to dispatch a suspect who opened fire during a Black Lives Matter protest, killing five officers and injuring several more. The unit is supposed to be used for bomb disposal, though it was harnessed by police last week to deliver an explosive instead. While the decision kept officers out of harm's way, some wondered about the implications of police deploying high-tech weapons without oversight. The Andros Mark V-A1, which is made by military tech company Northrop Grumman, contains a surveillance camera and an extendable arm with a rotatable "gripper." It's controlled wirelessly and can climb up stairs.

The company raised 1B on Jan. 4, including 500 million from General Motors. SAN FRANCISCO -- Lyft continued a flurry of news Monday with the extension of a program that could add hundreds of thousands of drivers to its ride-hailing service. Lyft said it is expanding its short-term, car-rental service for drivers, Express Drive, to the San Francisco Bay Area, Denver and Los Angeles this year. It is currently available in Chicago, Boston, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Lyft President John Zimmer and General Motors President Dan Ammann made the announcement before they are to discuss it later today at Fortune's Brainstorm tech conference in Aspen, Colo. In January, GM poured 500 million into Lyft to create an on-demand network of self-driving cars.

Who's better, Lebron James or Stephen Curry? Which country is more powerful, the United States or China? How advanced is modern AI compared to humans? Of the three ridiculous questions above, which appears most underspecified? However misguidedly, we often discuss complex, multi-faceted issues as though they were easily reduced to single scalar quantities. In the past few years, modern AI techniques have made great strides, accomplishing a number of feats traditionally associated with human intelligence. In particular, machine learning systems using deep neural networks now perform human-level speech recognition and transcription.

The androids have arrived, at least a century after modern art prophesied them. Artificial humans are advancing from the screens and pages of science fiction into our art galleries to look their flesh and blood cousins eerily in the eye. Artist Goshka Macuga, shortlisted for the Turner prize in 2008, has created a talking android for her latest exhibition at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin. It has black hair and bushy beard and talks philosophy: an intellectualtake on the Action Man toys I used to play with as a child. Macuga's robot has all the spooky uncanniness of a synthetic person with a realistically moulded face and bionic arms.

Eyal Grayevsky talks a lot about black holes, but he's not referring to the ones in outer space. The cofounder and CEO of FirstJob, an HR technology company, means the place where job applications go. One survey found that 75% of workers never heard back from a potential employer after applying. That hole turns into a vortex, according to Grayevsky, when candidates start applying to any job they're remotely qualified for. "It becomes a numbers game," he says.

Scientists in the Netherlands are looking to pair artificial intelligence (AI), or machine learning, with MRI techniques that measure blood perfusion in the brain. This approach, said the researchers -- diagnoses early forms of dementia and predicts the onset of Alzheimer's disease with between 82 and 90 percent accuracy. Though there is no cure for Alzheimer's, experts believe that early diagnosis could improve patient outcomes and alleviate the healthcare system's financial burden associated with the disease. According to the Alzheimer's Association, only 45 percent of patients and their caregivers dealing with the disease are aware of the diagnosis. Recent Alzheimer's research suggests that it may be possible to isolate biomarkers in the blood to diagnose the disease, demonstrated by scientists at Rowan University.

The devastating neurodegenerative condition Alzheimer's disease is incurable, but with early detection, patients can seek treatments to slow the disease's progression, before some major symptoms appear. Now, by applying artificial intelligence algorithms to MRI brain scans, researchers have developed a way to automatically distinguish between patients with Alzheimer's and two early forms of dementia that can be precursors to the memory-robbing disease. The researchers, from the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, suggest the approach could eventually allow automated screening and assisted diagnosis of various forms of dementia, particularly in centers that lack experienced neuroradiologists. Additionally, the results, published online July 6 in the journal Radiology, show that the new system was able to classify the form of dementia that patients were suffering from, using previously unseen scans, with up to 90 percent accuracy. "The potential is the possibility of screening with these techniques so people at risk can be intercepted before the disease becomes apparent," said Alle Meije Wink, a senior investigator in the center's radiology and nuclear medicine department. "I think very few patients at the moment will trust an outcome predicted by a machine," Wink told Live Science.

Say what you will about Google's AlphaGo AI, it generally turned up to its championship matches sober. Actually, most AI tend to stay away from the bottle – which makes sense given their lack of mouth, or digestive system, or sense of fun. One UK company is looking to change all that, though. IntelligentX's AI might not actually drink beer, but it is learning how to brew it thanks to machine-learning algorithms. It works like this: IntelligentX has made four different types of beer.

Robots could eventually play integral roles in labor wards, according to findings from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Robots are currently employed in hospitals to carry out simple actions, like dispensing medication. But can they understand patient needs and make scheduling decisions? The researchers have been working for the past two years to determine whether robots can be more than just helpful companions. They've been conducting experiments to see if a robot can serve as an effective "resource nurse." That's the nurse in the labor and delivery unit that's in charge of assigning other nurses to care for patients.