I was carpooling to a meeting by hitching a ride with an acquaintance whose route happened to pass near my home. Yet, the arrangement was far from straightforward. Our event would not begin until evening, and I would have to accompany my friend home and loiter for several awkward hours before her private driver dispatched us to the meeting. Cumbersome as all this would be, I felt lucky to have found a ride at all. Women in Saudi Arabia are unable to drive, and that evening my father--the only male of legal age in our family--was working late.

When we see two people meet, we can often predict what happens next: a handshake, a hug, or maybe even a kiss. Our ability to anticipate actions is thanks to intuitions born out of a lifetime of experiences. Machines, on the other hand, have trouble making use of complex knowledge like that. Computer systems that predict actions would open up new possibilities ranging from robots that can better navigate human environments, to emergency response systems that predict falls, to Google Glass-style headsets that feed you suggestions for what to do in different situations. This week researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have made an important new breakthrough in predictive vision, developing an algorithm that can anticipate interactions more accurately than ever before.

The U.S. robotics expert tapped to head Toyota's Silicon Valley research company says the 1 billion investment by the giant Japanese automaker will start showing results within five years. Gill Pratt told reporters that the Toyota Research Institute is also looking ahead into the distant future when there will be cars that anyone, including children and the elderly, can ride in on their own, as well as robots that help out in homes. Pratt, a former program manager at the U.S. military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, joined Toyota Motor Corp. first as a technical adviser when it set up its artificial intelligence research effort at Stanford University and MIT. He said safety features will be the first types of AI applications to appear in Toyota vehicles. Such features are already offered on some models now being sold, such as sensors that help cars brake or warn drivers before a possible crash, and cars that drive themselves automatically into parking spaces or on certain roads.

On June 28, Brian Eno will launch a new video experience for the title track of his latest album The Ship, which was released in April. What's different about this music video is, according to Eno, it isn't really a music video at all, but rather a visual experience informed by and created with artificial intelligence. "Just as I'm excited about the possibilities of artificial intelligence and new technologies, I'm so incredibly and numbingly bored with videos and the traditional music videos, that I just couldn't imagine wanting to do that," said Eno, on stage at Cannes Lions. "So really, this is an attempt to say, is there some other way we can do this thing?" The legendary artist and producer said that he's interested in finding out what new technologies can do, primarily because they so often can do something nobody ever thought they could do.

On a warm evening in 2014, Attila Szantner, a Hungarian Web entrepreneur, and his friend Bernard Revaz, a Swiss physics researcher, sat on a balcony in Geneva and discussed the perils of video games. The medium's greatest threat, they concluded, is not that it turns people into vicious killers, or that it dulls their communication skills, or that it sunders their minds from reality. No, the problem is that, in providing players with a sense of accomplishment, games may distract our species from genuine achievement. Who hasn't felt a house-proud throb of satisfaction at clearing a clutter of Tetris blocks or landing a rocket ship on the moon after centuries of effort in Civilization? Like crosswords and pornography, these activities are both alluring and vacuous: they do little to meet life's challenges on this side of the screen. But it occurred to Szantner and Revaz that the tremendous amount of time and energy that people put into games could be co-opted in the name of human progress.

Basic labour rights could be extended to robots. The European Parliament's legal affairs committee is considering plans to declare them'electronic persons'. MEPs, led by a socialist from Luxembourg, have suggested that member states should think about a world driven by automation - one solution discussed is a guaranteed universal basic income. Basic labour rights could be extended to robots. The European Parliament's legal affairs committee is considering plans to declare them'electronic persons' Robotics is expected to produce machines that are no longer just'tools' but agents in their own right, able to teach themselves, roam around and make decisions, the committee's report states.

Last weekend, a drone flown by Pakistan's air force crashed just shy of four miles from an airbase in the Punjab. The drone appears to have been a Chinese-made Wing Loong. The drone, also known as the Pterodactyl, serves with the Chinese military, as well as that of Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Until this crash, Pakistan was not a known operator of the Wing Loong. The drone resembles America's iconic Predator drone, and like how the Predator begat the Reaper, there's likely an improved version in the works, which might be what Pakistan is really after.

Despite the sophistication of their products, video game publishers are just as susceptible as less technically inclined brands to finding their carefully organised media coverage turning on them. This month, the trailer for upcoming game of drones and shooting people Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare became the second most disliked video in YouTube history, while fellow online first-person shooter, Battlefield 1 became one of the 150 most liked. One reason posited for this vast discrepancy is that players have finally got bored with the glib futurism of many current military games, their fatigue at yet more satellite strikes and exoskeletons brought into sharp relief by Battlefield 1's earthy, steampunk alternate first world war. While there may be an element of truth in that, it's mostly the result of vote-brigading by rabidly contrarian posters on games forums, and demonstrates that even with rigorous planning and budgetary figures normally associated with money laundering operations, you can still be the victim of unintended consequences. Capcom, makers of the Resident Evil series, also found out that publicity can create unpredictable knock-on effects.

After setting their conquest to saffronise Bharat in motion, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat is all set to make an international debut and take the sangh global. I can exclusively tell you that Bhagwat and RSS all-India join...