WASHINGTON – Last month, at two newly minted military facilities in eastern Saudi Arabia, US and Royal Saudi air defense units teamed up for live-fire drills to shoot down a series of training drones mimicking the speed and altitude of a variety of Iranian attack UAVs. In an exclusive interview with Al-Monitor, Army Gen. Michael "Erik" Kurilla, the top commander of US forces in the Middle East, described the first Red Sands counter-drone experimentation exercise as "very successful." But not everything went smoothly -- and that was the point. One Saudi-owned defense system proved unable to engage at the necessary range, forcing soldiers to improvise. Other weapons hit the targets successfully, including LIDS (Low, Slow, Unmanned Aircraft Integrated Defeat System) and Coyote counter-drone systems brought in by the US Army.

On Tuesday, the "Office of Melania Trump" account on Twitter posted a statement that may have been inspired by recent reports about the ex-first lady in People magazine and Page Six. People's articles, including one published on Monday, cite "sources" who say Melania is currently "angry" at her husband, Donald Trump, and "not comfortable" taking part in any of his campaign events, because his alleged affair with Stormy Daniels is in the news. By contrast, Page Six reported Monday that Melania and the former president "had a major talk over the weekend" and that she has "agreed to be on board" with the campaign. The public wants to know (I guess)! Unfortunately, the Melania statement does not clear anything up, or really say anything at all.

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Robert's past research focused on teamwork with technology, but a more accurate description of his current research would be a focus on collaboration through and with technology. His work has been published in leading information systems and information science journals, including Information Systems Research, the Journal of Management Information Systems, the Journal of the Association of Information Systems, PACM on Human-Computer Interaction, and the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. His research has also been published in premier human-computer interaction conferences--such as ACM's Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the ACM/IEEE Human Robot Interaction, and the ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work--and computational social and data science conferences, including the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, the International World Wide Web Conference, and the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. His research has been sponsored by the AAA Foundation, the Automotive Research Center/U.S. Army, Army Research Laboratory, Toyota Research Institute, MCity, Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, and the National Science Foundation.

Now, the US government is trying to get a handle on things. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is asking for public comments on possible regulations to hold AI creators accountable. The measures will ideally help the Biden administration ensure these models work as promised "without causing harm," the NTIA says. Hopefully, they'll also speak to experts, too, and not just rely on the anonymous internet public. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

Artificial Intelligence poses both risks and rewards, but developers should be weary of technologies that could threaten "scary" outcomes, AI technologist says. The capacity of artificial intelligence systems to learn things even when they aren't explicitly taught those things will pose a significant challenge both to the companies creating and marketing these tools, and federal regulators tasked with protecting consumers who use them, a member of the Federal Trade Commission predicted. "Personally, and I say this with respect, I do not see the existential threats to our society that others do," FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya said in recent speech made available this week. "Yet when you combine these statements with the unpredictability and inexplicability of these models, the sum total is something that we as consumer protection authorities have never reckoned with." Bedoya was speaking to the International Association of Privacy Professionals about the tendency of generative AI systems to pick up knowledge and intuition about subjects even when programmers aren't focusing on those topics.

Welcome to the premiere of WIRED's new podcast, Have a Nice Future. In this first episode, Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode talk to the mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, about how she plans to address the city's problems, from homelessness to crime to abandoned downtowns, and how the changes she's proposing could shape not just San Francisco but the cities of the future. Read more about the city WIRED calls home. Our coverage of San Francisco includes stories about self-driving cars, infrastructure, the tech industry, health care, and homelessness. You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, just tap this link, or open the app called Podcasts and search for Have a Nice Future.

The original 1985 theme from Super Mario Bros, Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You and Madonna's 1984 album Like a Virgin are among "the defining sounds of the nation's history and culture" to be given places in the US national recording registry, the Library of Congress has announced. The Super Mario Bros music, officially known as the Ground Theme, written by the young Nintendo composer Koji Kondo, becomes the first music from a video game to enter the registry, which the library called "the most recognisable video game theme in history". The tune has appeared in countless Mario-related incarnations. In all, 25 albums, singles and other sound artefacts spanning more than a century are being inducted into the registry, from the first known recording of mariachi music in 1908 and 1909 by Cuarteto Coculense, to 2012's Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra by the composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. Queen Latifah becomes the first female rapper with a recording in the registry with the inclusion of her 1989 album All Hail the Queen, whose songs include the feminist anthem Ladies First.

US regulators on Tuesday took the first action towards drawing up new regulations on artificial intelligence that could see the White House put the halts on new technologies such as ChatGPT. The US Department of Commerce put out a call for input from industry actors that would serve to inform the Biden administration in drafting a regulation on AI. US President Joe Biden last week said the jury is still out on whether AI poses a danger to society, but the action on Tuesday signaled that the White House is open to setting some ground rules. Just as food and cars are not released into the market without proper assurance of safety, so too AI systems should provide assurance to the public, government, and businesses that they are fit for purpose." The United States is home to the biggest developers of tech and AI, including Microsoft-backed OpenAI, which created ChatGPT but trails internationally in holding the industry. Biden has urged Congress to pass laws putting strict limits on big tech, but these have little chance of making headway given political divisions among lawmakers. The lack of rules has given Silicon Valley freedom to put out new products and stoked fears that AI technologies will wreak havoc on society before the government can catch up. Last month, billionaire mogul Elon Musk and a range of CEOs and experts called for a pause in the development of powerful AI. OpenAI has asked that its AI systems be subject to rigorous safety evaluations and said that comprehensive regulation of the sector was needed. Our inquiry will inform policies to support AI audits, risk and safety assessments, certifications, and other tools that can create earned trust in AI systems."

IN2018, ON A TRIP to his ancestral homeland, Alexandr Wang listened as China's brightest engineers gave impressive presentations on artificial intelligence. He found it odd that the researchers conspicuously avoided any mention of how AI might be used. Wang, whose immigrant parents were nuclear physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the first atomic bombs were designed, was unsettled. "They were really dodgy on what the use cases were. You could tell it was for no good," recalls Wang, the cofounder of Scale AI, who has no second "e" in his first name so that it has eight characters, a number associated with good fortune in Chinese culture. Scale was then an up-and-coming startup providing data services primarily to self-driving auto-makers.