In this talk, Prof. Iiyoshi goes head to head with an AI questioning the fate of education and lifelong learning! Toru Iiyoshi was previously a senior scholar and Director of the Knowledge Media Laboratory at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (1999-2008), and Senior Strategist in the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2009-2011). He is the co-editor of the Carnegie Foundation book, "Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge" (MIT Press, 2008) and co-author of three books including "The Art of Multimedia: Design and Development of The Multimedia Human Body" and numerous academic and commercial articles. He received the Outstanding Practice Award in Instructional Development and the Robert M. Gagne Award for Research in Instructional Design from the Association for Educational Communications and Technology. Currently, he is the director and a professor of the Center for the Promotion of Excellence in Higher Education (CPEHE) at Kyoto University.

A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one- or two-gram shaped charge. You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: "Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target." A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone's head. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don't have to be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target. There will be manufacturers producing millions of these weapons that people will be able to buy just like you can buy guns now, except millions of guns don't matter unless you have a million soldiers. You need only three guys to write the program and launch them. So you can just imagine that in many parts of the world humans will be hunted. They will be cowering underground in shelters and devising techniques so that they don't get detected. This is the ever-present cloud of lethal autonomous weapons. Mary Wareham laughs a lot. It usually sounds the same regardless of the circumstance -- like a mirthful giggle the blonde New Zealander can't suppress -- but it bubbles up at the most varied moments. Wareham laughs when things are funny, she laughs when things are awkward, she laughs when she disagrees with you. And she laughs when things are truly unpleasant, like when you're talking to her about how humanity might soon be annihilated by killer robots and the world is doing nothing to stop it. One afternoon this spring at the United Nations in Geneva, I sat behind Wareham in a large wood-paneled, beige-carpeted assembly room that hosted the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), a group of 121 countries that have signed the agreement to restrict weapons that "are considered to cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants or to affect civilians indiscriminately"-- in other words, weapons humanity deems too cruel to use in war. The UN moves at a glacial pace, but the CCW is even worse.

Cooperation is one of the hallmarks of being human. We are extremely social compared to other species. On a regular basis, we all enter into helping others in small but important ways, whether it be letting someone out in traffic or giving a tip for good service. We do this without any guarantee of payback. Donations are made at a small personal cost but with a bigger benefit to the recipient. This form of cooperation, or donation to others, is called indirect reciprocity and helps human society to thrive.

Earlier this year, the union representing U.S. airport security agents called for hiring 6,000 additional screeners to reduce long waits and help handle the rise in summer travelers. Government positions -- especially those at an agency like the Transportation Security Administration -- require a rigorous screening process in which officials might consider 100 employees for every one hire made. Airport security is clearly an area that could benefit from automation. Through a process known as organizational change management, TSA could automate some entry-level IT jobs that were previously handled by tech employees and repurpose those employees to ease the demand for additional security screeners. Automation allows employees to focus on more complex tasks, and artificial intelligence-based technology can handle knowledge work in a fraction of the time and with no errors -- a level of performance humans can't match.

Traditional marketing analytics tools provide perspective into yesterday's performance. But, in order to continuously adapt and improve upon the customer journey in real-time, we need to be able to see into the future. What content will interest our customers? Where will be the best place to engage them? What will be the best time to reach out?

Our future robot overlords never looked so squishy. A team of scientists led out of Harvard University have managed to build an entirely soft robot -- one that's inspired by an octopus. The octobot, described this week in the journal Nature, could pave the way toward more effective soft robots that could be used in search and rescue, exploration and to more safely interact with humans. "The octobot is a minimal system designed to demonstrate our integrated design and fabrication strategy," the study authors wrote, "which may serve as a foundation for a new generation of completely soft, autonomous robots." Traditionally, robots have been seen as stiff, angular entities, made of metal and other rigid materials (think C3PO in Star Wars).

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Slate and Future Tense are discussing Mr. Robot and the technological world it portrays throughout the show's second season. You can follow this conversation on Future Tense, and Slate Plus members can also listen to Hacking Mr. Robot, a members-only podcast series featuring Lily Newman and Fred Kaplan. In this episode of Hacking Mr. Robot, Fred and Lily discuss Episode 8: "eps2.6succ3ss0r.p12." They're joined by special guest Matt Devost, a cybersecurity expert and the CEO of FusionX. Fred Kaplan is the author of Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War.

We all know that hiring managers can be racist when choosing the "right" (read: white) candidate for a job, but what about computers? If you have a name like Ebony or Jamal at the top of your resume, new research suggests that some algorithms will make less "pleasant" associations with your moniker than if you are named Emily or Matt. Machines are increasingly being used to make all kinds of important decisions, like who gets what kind of health insurance coverage, or which convicts are most likely to reoffend. The idea here is that computers, unlike people, can't be racist, but we're increasingly learning that they do in fact take after their makers. As just one example, ProPublica reported in May that an algorithm used by officials in Florida systematically rated white offenders as being lower risk of committing a future crime than blacks.

Data Natives Speaker Dr. Stefan Kühn is Lead Data Scientist at codecentric. Together with his team he is developing robust, fast and intelligent algorithms and is applying modern machine learning methods for analyzing large datasets. Before codecentric he was a researcher in the Scientific Computing Group at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences Leipzig with a focus on Tensor Approximation and Higher-Order Singular Value Decomposition. He earned a Diploma in Applied Mathematics, with a focus on Mathematical Optimization, at the University of Hamburg. He went on to get PhD in Applied Mathematics with a focus on Numerics, Tensor Approximation and Higher-Order Singular Value Decomposition, at the Max Planck Insitute for Mathematics in the Sciences Leipzig in 2012. High-dimensional data is very hard to analyze and understand.