Musk and other tech giants are joining forces to fund research that will halt artificial intelligence from overtaking mankind. Elon Musk's contributions to society know no bounds: his latest scheme is intended to save humanity from being destroyed by artificial intelligence (AI). The billionaire, known for garnering a massive amount of wealth and attention with his revolutionary projects of PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX, has consistently warned against AI, recently calling it humanity's greatest existential threat. His belief of the detriment AI may cause has led him to pool forces with other well-known tech entrepreneurs to establish an investment fund intended for researchers to pursue actions with a positive social impact. The 1 billion fund is slated to assist humans in staying at least one step ahead of technology.

US car-hailing company Uber has joined the race for driverless car technology, confirming it is testing a vehicle on the streets of Pittsburgh. The company said in a statement it had outfitted a Ford Fusion with radar, laser scanners and cameras. Uber's project is being carried out in partnership with Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University. More and more car and technology firms are partnering up to develop self-driving vehicles. Aside from pioneer Google, companies like Tesla are also developing the technology, while Chinese car and tech firms have also made significant progress. Uber's ultimate goal is a complete end to car ownership - and it's wasting no time.

Scientists have designed flying, insect-sized robots that can perch and launch from ceilings. The robots use something called electrostatic adhesion, the same process by which statically-charged balloons stick to walls. The findings, reported in the journal Science, contribute to a decade-long Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory project called "RoboBee". The robots in this study are programmed drones, each around the size of a 10 pence coin. Dr Mirko Kovac, director of the Aerial Robotics Laboratory of Imperial College, London, who was not involved in this study, told BBC News that similar robots were currently being trialled in environmental monitoring and disaster-relief efforts. Equipped with sensors, swarms of these small, relatively cheap robots, Dr Kovac explained, could alert first responders to the most intense areas of forest fires or other natural disasters.

SAN FRANCISCO – Google on Thursday had a fresh U.S. patent for a sticky coating that could be applied to self-driving cars so pedestrians stick instead of bouncing off when hit. The patent describes a layer of adhesive on a car's hood, front bumper and possibly front side panels sealed with a coating that, when broken, would expose a gluey surface akin to flypaper modified to catch humans. "Upon impact with a pedestrian, the coating is broken exposing the adhesive layer," read patent paperwork dated May 17 and listing the applicant as Google. "The adhesive bonds the pedestrian to the vehicle so that the pedestrian remains with the vehicle until it stops, and is not thrown from the vehicle, thereby preventing a secondary impact between the pedestrian and the road surface or other object." Google reasoned in the patent application that pedestrians hit by cars typically suffer further injury by being knocked or hurled to the pavement or other objects.

For almost 20 years, Lionhead Studios was a beacon of the UK games industry. In a medium where big budgets tend to shrink ambitions, here was a group of experimenters, inventors, and craftspeople who always produced something curious, whether that was creative oddity The Movies or the hugely successful Fable series. Formed in Guildford in 1996, the studio was independent for a decade before Microsoft acquired it. Another decade later, on 31 April 2016, the lights were turned off for the final time. Lionhead made games with big choices, and it was ended by a cruel one. For much of its history, the studio was synonymous with Peter Molyneux, the idiosyncratic game designer who co-founded seminal Guildford studio Bullfrog in the 1990s. There, he oversaw a string of classic sim titles – Populous, Powermonger, Syndicate, Theme Park – before selling up to Electronic Arts in 1995.

Uber has announced that it is in the early stages of testing self-driving car technology with the ultimate goal of removing the need for drivers from its ride-hailing business. The company, currently valued at somewhere upwards of 60 billion, announced it has begun testing a Ford Fusion retro-fitted with sensors and cameras on the streets of Pittsburgh. "Real-world testing is critical to our efforts to develop self-driving technology," the company said in a blog post announcing the move. "Self-driving cars have the potential to save millions of lives and improve quality of life for people around the world." The tests will be run by Uber's Advanced Technologies Center, which the company opened in Pittsburgh in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University in February last year, with the goal of inducting autonomous vehicles into its fleet by 2020.

The National Telecommunications & Information Administration released Thursday a list of voluntary privacy best practices for commercial and non-commercial drone users, in the wake of concerns that drones could encroach on individual privacy and open a new front in the collection of personal data for commercial use. The privacy guidance, arrived at in consensus with drone organizations and companies like Amazon and Google's parent Alphabet, recommends that drone operators who collect personal data should have a privacy policy that explains what personally identifiable information they will collect, for what purpose the data is collected and if it will be shared with others, including in response to requests from law enforcement agencies. The guidelines also encourage drone operators to avoid using or sharing personal data for marketing purposes without consent of the individual. Drone operators should also not use personal data without consent for "employment eligibility, promotion, or retention; credit eligibility; or health care treatment eligibility other than when expressly permitted by and subject to the requirements of a sector-specific regulatory framework." Data collected should also not be held beyond a reasonable period, without the consent of the individual, or in exceptional circumstances, such as legal disputes or safety incidents.

There is so much doom and gloom associated with robots and jobs it is time to add some common sense to the misunderstandings created by so called experts opinions about robots and jobs – thankfully authors from the OECD may have added some clarity to the debate -- 'finding that on average, across the 21 OECD countries, '9% of jobs rather than 47%, as proposed by Frey and Osborne face a high automatibility.' Capitalism, the term for our global'free' markets, is a uniquely future-oriented economic system in which people invest, make innovations, apply for patents, and in other ways bet on the future. Behind all of this we find the hallmark of humanity, which is our creative intelligence. It is intelligence that drives these investments and innovations, and intelligence that forges within many of us an intense curiosity of what the future may hold. It is also intelligence that forges in others an anxiety over what the future holds. For many the future is no longer a promise but a threat!

The giant hedge fund, which manages 35 billion, is as much a technology company as it is a hedge fund. It uses advanced technologies to find investment opportunities, and it just hosted its annual artificial intelligence competition. One of those technological applications involves using natural-language-processing techniques to analyze the Fed minutes, such as those set for release Wednesday afternoon. "Historically, interpretations of those minutes required art, so Fed watchers pontificated and critiqued," the firm said in a note. "Now natural language processing techniques can translate those minutes into relatively objective data."

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