With the number of commercial drones expected to soar into the millions in the next few years, operators whose unmanned aircraft malfunction or crash will be looking for places to get them fixed. Some repair shops authorized by manufacturers to fix smaller drones are already having trouble keeping up with demand. For several weeks, a California company had a note posted on its website referring specifically to the Phantom drone: "Temporarily not accepting any new repairs at this time due to high volume. The message was recently removed. While such waits might be frustrating for operators, it spells opportunity for repair shops keen to diversify and budding drone mechanics who could start lucrative careers repairing commercial drones without having to pay for a four-year college degree. "I'm trying to hire two experienced drone technicians at $20 an hour and I can't find anybody," said James Barnes, who founded the New Jersey Drone Academy. "This gives kids in urban areas that can't go to college now a chance to work at a trade and make decent money." Northland Community and Technical College in Minnesota has been teaching unmanned aircraft maintenance for larger military-type drones. It is expanding its program to include smaller drone repair, and school officials are promising a high-paying job after just one or two years. "The reality is, the people coming out of the trade schools, the technical colleges, places like that, are the people out there getting jobs and they're getting paid nicely to do it," said Zack Nicklin, unmanned aircraft instructor at the school in Thief River Falls, Minn. Unmanned aircraft owners basically have three options when their drones need tune-ups or repairs. They can send it back to the manufacturer, send it to a repair shop or fix it themselves. Most smaller shops specialize in hobby grade or low-end commercial grade drones, specific to a few manufacturers. Those drones typically cost a few thousand dollars to buy, and about $150 to fix, not including parts. The more expensive commercial drones generally need repair experts, many of whom have backgrounds in manned aviation. Brad Hayden of Albuquerque, N.M., is president and CEO of Robotic Skies, which is building a network of affiliated repair stations around the world. He currently has more than 120 service stations, most of which work on higher-end drones that cost $10,000 and up, and he plans to recruit more shops, as needed. "The industry is always short of avionics technicians.

The meaning of "work" is changing, and with life expectancies growing, the gig economy taking hold and artificial intelligence taking plenty of people's jobs, millennials will have careers that are worlds away from those of their forebears, says Dr. Linda Sharkey, global managing director of the consulting firm Achieveblue Inc. Sharkey is the author of "The Future-Proof Workplace: Six Strategies to Accelerate Talent Development, Reshape Your Culture and Succeed with Purpose," co-written with Morag Barnett, the chief executive of the business management consultancy SkyeTeam. She talked to International Business Times about the prospects for 21st-century careers, the falling value of a four-year degree and the idea that a robot might be conducting this sort of question-and-answer article in the not-so-far-away future. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. One issue you touch on in your book is your expectation that retirement will cease to be a 21st century phenomenon, and that today's young workers are more likely to take sabbaticals than end their careers by their late sixties. Is this something you think will be born of choice -- a desire to work longer -- or a consequence of the unsustainability of Social Security as generations live longer and have fewer children?

Accelerating trends in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics point to significant economic disruption in the years ahead. Together, machine learning, natural-language recognition, biometrics, and decision management are converging toward what the World Economic Forum has described as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. To this point, technology has consistently generated more jobs than it destroys--but many now wonder if "this time is different." According to McKinsey & Company, half of all existing work activities could be automated by currently existing technologies, saving some $16 trillion in wages. Forecasts indicate that revenues from AI will expand from the current $8 billion to more than $47 billion by 2020.

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At the International Astronautical Congress last September, in Guadalajara, Mexico, Elon Musk convinced many die-hard space engineers he could get a fleet of private rockets filled with thousands of people to Mars. Musk's speech was long on orbits, flight plans, and fuel costs. But it was short on how any of those colonists would survive. In fact, the Mars journey would likely be a dead end. Bathed in radiation and with nothing growing on it, the Red Planet is basically a graveyard.

In debates over the future of artificial intelligence, many experts think of the new systems as coldly logical and objectively rational. But in a new study, researchers have demonstrated how machines can be reflections of us, their creators, in potentially problematic ways. Common machine learning programs, when trained with ordinary human language available online, can acquire cultural biases embedded in the patterns of wording, the researchers found. These biases range from the morally neutral, like a preference for flowers over insects, to the objectionable views of race and gender. Identifying and addressing possible bias in machine learning will be critically important as we increasingly turn to computers for processing the natural language humans use to communicate, for instance in doing online text searches, image categorization and automated translations.

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Let's admit that this looked like a bad election for video games at the outset, once it came down to Trump versus Clinton. As a senator in 2005, Clinton coauthored federal legislation to criminalize the sale of violent video games to minors. In a press conference that year she even claimed that the effects of violent games on kids' behavior was as bad as the result of lead poisoning on IQ, a claim that is…well…nuts. The worst video game news on the Trump front comes from one of Trump's tweets from 2012 following the awful Sandy Hook shooting in which a 20-year-old male killed numerous children and elementary school personnel as well as his mother and himself. Soon after, Trump tweeted "Video game violence & glorification must be stopped – it is creating monsters!" But in all fairness Trump was hardly the only person to blame video games.

It has been heavily criticised for its woeful response to remove jihadi videos and other shocking pages from the internet. But Google is finally claiming to have come up with a solution to crack down on vulgar content online – computer systems that can be'offended' like humans. Google hopes its systems will be able to see the difference between a jihadi with a gun and a scene from an action film – and take down the inappropriate material. Google is finally claiming to have come up with a solution to crack down on vulgar content online – computer systems that can be'offended' like humans. Google now wants the computers which monitor content being uploaded through YouTube and other channels to understand the nuances of what makes a video offensive.

As a computer science student many years ago, I learned a bit about artificial intelligence and its applications. At first, I was quite excited by the idea of computers thinking like humans. Then, I quickly realized: computers couldn't really "think"-- at least not the way that a human brain could. What if--I thought--we gave a computer large amounts of data and compute power. Could it do something that resembled thinking?