While much of the media attention around autonomous vehicle technology has been focused on fully self-driving cars, consumers shouldn't expect cars to act like chauffeurs any time soon. The vast majority of mainstream vehicles adopting autonomous driving features will be controlled by advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) or "guardian angels" that learn over time, Gil Pratt, CEO Toyota Research Institute, told reporters and analysts last week. Speaking at the New England Motor Press Association Technology Conference at MIT, Pratt said that 30,000 motor vehicle fatalities occur in the U.S. each year. That number may seem high, but as a whole, U.S. drivers are excellent at avoiding crashes. So, instead of taking the wheel from drivers' hands, as a fully autonomous vehicle would do, auto makers are more focused on assisting drivers for years to come.

Most people have heard about self-driving cars, with companies from Google to Honda developing autonomous vehicles. But driverless technology could be going beyond cars, with the testing of a self-flying helicopter. A Sikorsky S-76 commercial helicopter has now successfully taken off and flown autonomously 30 miles, before landing itself safely. The helicopter in the trial was the Sikorsky S-76 model which used Sikorsky's MATRIX system The Sikorsky Autonomy Research Aircraft (SARA), used Sikorsky's MATRIX system. This is the same system that is use in the Optionally Piloted Black Hawk (OPBH) Demonstrator.

Michelangelo's'Creation of Adam' as seen through Google's Deep Dream Created by digital artist Kyle McDonald using Google's Deep Dream program. In the summer of 2015, researchers at Google realized they could make their artificial intelligence algorithms dream. They set the programs to not just classify images, but enhance what they saw. The machines showed their interpretation of art. The researchers found they could also set the programs to generate images, giving an idea of how the machine thought certain objects looked.

MD Anderson Cancer Center is sitting on 23 petabytes of data, including more than 2 billion diagnostic radiology images, generated by its massive IT infrastructure. But Chris Belmont, vice president and CIO, isn't intimidated by the amount of data--he's just scared of staring at it too long. "Our biggest fear when we decided to move into Big Data was that, like many healthcare organizations, we'd have a two-year data'ingestion' process where we'd keep thinking about that massive set of data, and connect all our systems big and small together, go get even more data from external sources, and then eventually offer our users an add-on tool and tell them to go at it," Belmont says. "By the time we'd be done ingesting all that data, the time to change the game in terms of costs or population health would have already passed." MD Anderson, the Houston-based health system devoted to cancer care, isn't the type of organization to let time slip by.

Because Google wants to give humankind a fighting chance incase it accidentally makes Skynet. Google is trying to come out ahead of the imminent robot apocalypse by giving us humans a last hope in stopping the machines from taking over. The developers at Google-owned DeepMind technologies, which specializes in artificial intelligence, have proposed a "big red button" that could shut off the A.I. if anything goes wrong and wouldn't be susceptible to being disabled by the machine itself. If any company is going to build Skynet -- the fictional eye in the sky that leads to the near elimination of humankind in the Terminator movies -- it's Google. The parallels are just too easy to make. But you know, Skynet didn't start out evil.

Fears about the power of maniacal machines have been growing in recent years. Google is working on a'kill switch' to stop intelligent robots turning on their human masters. Fears about the power of maniacal machines have been growing in recent years, with both tech pioneer Elon Musk and Professor Stephen Hawking warning of the dreadful possibility of a Terminator-style war between humanity and our super-smart silicon creations . Now the search engine giant has published a paper outlining the work its British artificial intelligence (AI) team Deep Mind team is doing to ensure humanity is not swept away by a metallic fist. Deep Mind develops algorithms to allow robots to learn for themselves directly from raw experience or data.

Few days ago, at a tech conference in California, the great visionary Elon Musk made quite a statement in response to an interesting philosophical question from the audience about our civilization living in a simulation. Musk's key conclusion to the response was that "There is only a'one in billions' chance that we're not living in a computer simulation". How the heck did he get to this point? The simplified schema of Musk's reasoning is the following: since we have been making substantial improvements in technology (and especially in video-games) in the last 40 years, at this rate (or even at a 1000-times slower rate) we will be able to reach relatively soon advances in such technologies which will not allow to distinguish anymore between reality and virtual (or digital) reality. Hence, it is much more likely that we are already living in this future and in one of these virtual realities, implying also that someone "got there before us".

Hours before the Federal Reserve Bank of New York approved four fraudulent requests to send 81 million from a Bangladesh Bank account to cyber thieves, the Fed branch blocked those same requests because they lacked information required to transfer money, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

Perhaps the Terminator/Skynet concept of world domination isn't as far-fetched as one might assume. Today, robots are doing everything from service industry jobs to writing and almost winning literary prizes. The formidable advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have prompted not just experts, but the public, to start wondering how we can protect ourselves from robots taking over. Wouldn't robots, with their ever-advancing technology that moves closer and closer to near-human intelligence and consciousness, soon need protection from humans too? This is a question that mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, from the University of Oxford, is asking. As we move closer to a reality of robots equipped with advanced AI, shouldn't they be given moral and legal protection that has, until now, been granted freely to humans?

Last week the smart watch company Pebble announced a Kickstarter campaign for a new device that has no watch face and lives on your key ring. While optimized for exercise (it streams Spotify and quantifies your run) the Pebble Core also can be retooled easily to perform a variety of different functions, limited only by the apps that developers might imagine. Buried in the company's Kickstarter pitch was one of those ideas: "Add a Bluetooth or wired headset to create an always-on walkie-talkie or personal voice assistant." The italics are mine, but today Pebble itself is boldfacing those last few words, by announcing that the Core will integrate the capabilities of Amazon's Alexa super-bot. Pebble has been upfront about its broad vision for the Core, and while its pocket gadget has no microphone, a simple mobile-phone earbud or Bluetooth headset enables two way voice interaction.