KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN – When U.S. drones obliterated a car carrying Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour last month, it was the kind of targeted killing that unmanned aircraft are best known for. But 15 years after a drone first fired missiles in combat, the U.S. military's drone program has expanded far beyond specific strikes to become an everyday part of the war machine. Now, from control booths in the United States and bases around the Middle East, Afghanistan and parts of Africa, drone crews are flying surveillance missions and providing close air support for troops on the ground. "In the wars we fight, this is the future," said drone pilot Lieutenant Shaw, as he stood in a hangar at the air force's drone base in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. Crews spoke to Reuters on condition that only their first names and rank be used to identify them.

The fast-growing global drone industry has not sat back waiting for government policy to be hammered out before pouring investment and effort into opening up this all-new hardware and computing market. A growing ecosystem of drone software and hardware vendors is already catering to a long list of clients in agriculture, land management, energy, and construction. Many of the vendors are smallish private companies and startups -- although large defense-focused companies and industrial conglomerates are beginning to invest in drone technology, too. In a report from BI Intelligence, we take a deep dive into the various levels of the growing global industry for commercial drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This 32-page report provides forecasts for the business opportunity in commercial drone technology, looks at advances and persistent barriers, highlights the top business-to-business markets in terms of applications and end users, and provides an exclusive list of dozens of notable companies already active in the space.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos talks with The Verge's Walt Mossberg about the "gigantic" potential of artificial intelligence to change everything from shopping to self-driving cars. Bezos also discusses his purchase of the Washington Post in 2013, which he says is transforming from a local to a global institution. He explains why he opposes both Peter Thiel's campaign against Gawker Media and Donald Trump's attempts to "freeze or chill" press scrutiny. Plus: Why Bezos's other company, Blue Origin, is trying to lower the cost of entrepreneurship in space.

There's no really delicate way to say this, so I'm just going to do it: The vast majority of people have no idea what they're talking about when they talk about drone law. I've noticed this in comment threads on Facebook, on Twitter, on comment threads on Reddit, in bar conversations, etc. If you've engaged in one of these misinformed debates, though, I forgive you: It's not your fault. If you're looking for a simple answer to the question posed in the headline, I'm sorry, I can't give you one. But what I can give you is an exhaustive guide to drone law in the United States. In order to have any idea what's legal to do with a drone and what's not legal to do with a drone, it's necessary to have paid close attention to the FAA's actions over the last three years or so. Some conversations with actual lawyers help, as well.

On Tuesday, Wix introduced Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI), an AI-powered tool that will automatically create a custom website for businesses and users. The tool could potentially save SMBs and individual professionals save time and money building and maintaining their web presence. Nitzan Achsaf, the head of Wix ADI, said that the AI component is proprietary, and the company has multiple patents on it. It was built over the past two years with help from more than a dozen AI engineers, leveraging 10 years worth of data from 86 million users. "Wix ADI is the world's first technology platform that combines website design and content creation with artificial intelligence to enable complete websites to be created in a matter of minutes," said Avishai Abrahami, co-founder and CEO of Wix.

Tel Aviv-based Wix, a web development platform, is bring artificial intelligence (AI) into website design and creation. The company today launches Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) -- arguably a first of its kind solution that claims to reduce the time, design and content creation challenges associated with site development. ADI provides intelligent design choices based on data gleaned from some 85 million users of the Wix platform, Nitzan Achsaf, head of Wix ADI, told CMSWire. "It gathers information across the web about your business and it knows where to enter it in the right place on the website, which means that it knows the best content to offer for your website page by page, section by section," Achsaf said. "This hand holding starts at the beginning and continues until you finish your website. It doesn't matter what content you choose. The ADI knows how to build beautiful websites."

CrowdFlower, a crowdsourced data-cleaning and tagging platform, has closed a fresh 10 million in funding in a round led by Microsoft Ventures, Canvas Ventures, and Trinity Ventures. Founded out of San Francisco in 2009, CrowdFlower had previously raised 28 million, including a 12.5 million round back in 2014, but the company says it will use its cash influx to expedite the adoption of a new machine-learning product called CrowdFlower AI. CrowdFlower will use a combination of humans and artificial intelligence to "make data useful" by helping teams organize their data more effectively at scale. For example, a company may have a large database of numbers and demographics, but some fields might be empty, incorrect, or incomplete -- something that a human is best placed to fix. So when a company uploads its data into CrowdFlower and stipulates the rules, humans from around the world link in and do the labeling manually.

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry. The idea of talking conversationally to computers has been a long time in the works. Science fiction is so often a self-fulfilling prophecy, as it provides a vision for humans to chase after with technological innovation. For those of us who have watched voice-based computer interactions evolve, we have seen it go through many manifestations as it grew up. We now find ourselves in a world where using voice to interface with a computer is commonplace on a regular basis for the masses.

The U.S. spends 270 billion on incarceration each year, has a prison population of about 2.2 million and an incarceration rate that's spiked 220 percent since the 1980s. But with the advent of data science, White House officials are asking experts for help. On Tuesday, June 7, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's Lynn Overmann, who also leads the White House Police Data Initiative, stressed the severity of the nation's incarceration crisis while asking a crowd of data scientists and artificial intelligence specialists for aid. "We have built a system that is too large, and too unfair and too costly -- in every sense of the word -- and we need to start to change it," Obermann said, speaking at a Computing Community Consortium public workshop. She argued that the U.S., a country that has the highest amount incarcerated citizens in the world, is in need of systematic reforms with both data tools to process alleged offenders and at the policy level to ensure fair and measured sentences.

DETROIT – General Motors chief executive Mary Barra came out strongly Tuesday for regulations requiring the retention of steering wheels and foot pedals in self-driving cars. As the largest U.S. automaker pushes into developing autonomous cars and trucks, Barra said keeping the vestigial appendages of traditional human-piloted vehicles is crucial for safety. "We do think we have a leadership position in autonomous," Barra said. "It is very important we demonstrate safety. We think having the steering wheel and pedals in the cars is a way to demonstrate safety."