It is hard to miss the warnings. In the race to make computers more intelligent than us, humanity will summon a demon, bring forth the end of days, and code itself into oblivion. Instead of silicon assistants we'll build silicon assassins. The doomsday story of an evil AI has been told a thousand times. But our fate at the hand of clever cloggs robots may in fact be worse - to summon a class of eternally useless human beings.

A senior commander of the Afghan Taliban confirmed on Sunday that the extremist group's leader, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, has been killed in a U.S. drone strike. Mullah Abdul Rauf, who recently reconciled with Mansour after initially rebelling against his ascension to the leadership, told The Associated Press that Mansour died in the strike late Friday "in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area." The office of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani confirmed in a statement that the strike took place but could not confirm Mansour's death. Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, however, said that Mansour is "more than likely" dead. Speaking live on television as he chaired a Cabinet meeting, Abdullah said Mansour's death would have a positive impact on attempts to bring peace to Afghanistan, where the Taliban have been waging an insurgency for 15 years.

A senior Taliban commander confirmed early Sunday the death of the group's Afghan leader Mullah Mansour in a U.S. drone strike. A U.S. official told Fox News Saturday that Mansour was "likely" killed in the strike, while the White House is awaiting official confirmation of Mansour's death before releasing their own statement about the strike. President Obama authorized the strike, which occurred at about 6 a.m. Mansour was traveling in a vehicle when the strike occurred. It was carried out my multiple unmanned aircraft operated by U.S. Special Operations Forces.

Baidu is planning to shift its focus to Artificial Intelligence (AI).(Photo Baidu Inc. is planning to overhaul its business model, shifting from its current search oriented model to one that focuses on'artificial intelligence.' Baidu CEO Li Yanhong said in a company's internal letter on Tuesday that this change will help the company to develop new products in areas such as search, automatic translation, and driverless vehicles. Industry observers say that the shift in business model will likely affect the company's short-term profitability. Li also promised to put more emphasis on user experience and set up a department to weed out any action or behavior that damages its user' experience.

Brian Christian is the author of The Most Human Human, which was named a Wall Street Journal bestseller and a New Yorker favourite book of 2011, and has been translated into ten languages. He is the coauthor, with Tom Griffiths, of Algorithms to Live By, available Spring 2016. The Most Human Human is a provocative, exuberant, and profound exploration of the ways in which computers are reshaping our ideas of what it means to be human. He has just released his latest book, Algorithms to Live By. Co-written with cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths, the book offers a fascinating exploration of how computer algorithms can be applied to our everyday lives, helping to solve common decision-making problems and illuminate the workings of the human mind.

Everywhere you turn these days there are more and more automated processes appearing all the time. From automatic vacuum cleaners to self-order counters at restaurants, to cars that automatically park themselves, robots are all around us in one way or another and physics is no different. In using the latest artificial intelligence to do the same tasks as people, we are not only saving time and money but saving on resources too. A recent physics experiment developed by physicists from The Australian National University (ANU) and the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy (UNSW ADFA) was shown to be completed by artificial intelligence (AI) just as a human would. The test was to create a replica of "Laser Beam" experiment that won the 2001 Nobel Prize and produced an extremely cold gas trapped in a laser beam (known as Bose-Einstein condensate) and the incredible AI literally taught itself how to do the experiment, from start to finish, in under one hour!

KABUL – Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mansour, who according to U.S. officials was probably killed in a drone strike, took over as head of the insurgent movement last July following the revelation that the group's founder, Mullah Omar, had been dead for two years. He was initially thought to favor peace talks with the government, but after becoming leader he repeatedly refused to come to the negotiating table. For some Mansour was the obvious choice to succeed Mullah Omar, the one-eyed warrior-cleric who led the Taliban from its rise in the chaos of the Afghan civil war of the 1990s. Born in the same southern province, Kandahar, some time in the early 1960s, Mansour was part of the movement from the start and effectively in charge since 2013, according to Taliban sources. Mansour spent part of his life in Pakistan, like millions of Afghans who fled the Soviet occupation.

A senior commander with the Afghan Taliban says the militant group's leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour has been killed in a U.S. drone strike. Mullah Abdul Rauf told The Associated Press Sunday that Mansour died in the strike late Friday night. He says the strike took place "in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area." The office of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani confirmed the strike but could not confirm Mansour's death. Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, however, says that Mansour is "more than likely" dead.

Sundar Pichai made a bold statement in a letter to shareholders. After describing the evolution of computers since the nineties, from hulking desktop machines to petite portable devices, he wrote, "Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the'device' to fade away." His point was that, because computing technology is becoming smaller and more powerful, computers can be built in all kinds of forms. Building devices is no longer hard. The difficult part--and the part that will distinguish products from one another--is the experience that computers facilitate.

Professor Bart Baesens is a professor at KU Leuven (Belgium), and a lecturer at the University of Southampton (United Kingdom). He has done extensive research on analytics, customer relationship management, web analytics, fraud detection, and credit risk management. His findings have been published in well-known international journals (e.g. Machine Learning, Management Science, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Journal of Machine Learning Research, …) and presented at international top conferences. He is also author of the books Credit Risk Management: Basic Concepts, published by Oxford University Press in 2008; and Analytics in a Big Data World published by Wiley in 2014. His research is summarized at www.dataminingapps.com.