A robot: less frightening than it looks. Now I have heard it all. The idea came out of Bill de Blasio just before he gave up his bid to gain the Democratic presidential nomination, but he is not alone. Other progressives have fastened on to the idea, as have several Silicon Valley business leaders. It has, in other words, acquired a life of its own.

Traditionally, so-called radio spectrum hasn't been allocated in the most efficient way. The bands are then parceled out to different commercial and government entities for their exclusive use. While the process helps services avoid interference with one another, whoever holds the rights to a bit of spectrum rarely uses all of it 100% of the time. As a result, a large fraction of the allocated frequencies end up unused at any given moment.

Key point: These World War II drones were only effective in highly-specialized circumstances. On April 18, Moscow announced that it would feature its Uran-9 robot-tanks in its military parade celebrating the seventy-third anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. The compact Uran-9 bristles with a 30mm cannon and anti-tank missiles--and it is of course, unmanned. The defense ministry also periodically insists that it will develop an unmanned version of its new T-14 Armata main battle tank. Curiously, Moscow has been developing robot-tanks for nearly ninety years.

Roger Bootle is not afraid to think and say unconventional things. He is that rare phenomenon: a professional economist who thinks that Brexit is a Good Idea. Indeed, he belongs to a group called Economists for Brexit, now renamed as Economists for Free Trade, which argues for a no-deal Brexit. Whatever you think of that, the economics consultancy that Bootle founded, Capital Economics, has been very successful financially, and in 2012 it was awarded the £250,000 Wolfson Economics Prize, the second most valuable economics prize in the world after the Nobel, for a proposal that EU member states who wanted to exit should default on a large part of their debts. A book on tech unemployment from such a high-profile economist is to be warmly welcomed.

White House and federal leaders have been working behind the scenes to lay the groundwork to use technology for dramatic improvements in healthcare. Since the announcement of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Initiative earlier this year there has been increased funding and agency proposals that will lead to more accurate diagnoses, earlier treatments and ultimately empower patients be in control of their own health. But even more attention is needed to keep America competitive on the global AI front. The Executive AI Initiative provided a technology road map including healthcare. The President signed an Executive Order in February 2019 setting the tone for improved data connectivity and stronger public-private partnerships to spark new products in the marketplace and inspire entrepreneurs.

The Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence is calling for the U.S. government to make a $120 billion investment in the nation's AI ecosystem over the course of the next 10 years. The report calls efforts by the Trump administration, like the call for near $1 billion in U.S. non-defense research and development spending in 2020, "encouraging, but not nearly enough." The national AI vision report specifically calls for $2 billion in annual spending to support entrepreneurs and expand innovation, $3 billion on education, and $7 billion on interdisciplinary research to discover breakthrough advances in the field. The report was written by center directors John Etchemendy and Dr. Fei-Fei Li, and it calls underfunding of AI a threat to U.S. global leadership and a "national emergency in the making." Li is a leader at the Stanford Computer Vision Lab, creator of ImageNet, and until last year, served as chief AI scientist for Google Cloud.

AI and ML are often touted as silver bullets, but real-world applications for the technology seem thin on the ground. Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are some of the latest tools being used in the fight against application security vulnerabilities. However, the complexities involved can make it hard to discern what's actually being used and what lives in a fictional Hollywood setting. I spoke to Ilia Kolochenko, CEO of web security company High-Tech Bridge to clear up any confusion. Scott Matteson: What is the overall state of application security today?

Viz.ai, a healthcare startup that's using artificial intelligence (AI) to help medical professionals spot early signs of stroke, has raised $50 million in a series B round of funding led by Greenoaks, with participation from Alphabet's VC arm GV and Kleiner Perkins. In the U.S. alone, someone has a stroke every 40 seconds, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), culminating in some 140,000 deaths each year -- or 1 in every 20 deaths. Moreover, those who survive a stroke often suffer long-term disability as a result. As with many medical conditions, early stroke detection is the key to treating and negating the impact of strokes, but they can be difficult to diagnose. And even then, coordinating treatment among the various specialists can cause unnecessary delays.

A national AI strategy is not just for the superpowers: while the US and China are battling it out for the future dominance in AI, smaller states are making their own plans to capitalize on the benefits of machine learning. The government of Scotland believes artificial intelligence technologies could add £13 billion to the county's economic output and improve quality of life for its citizens. For this reason, as part of its program for 2019-2020, Holyrood has just announced plans to develop a comprehensive roadmap aimed at maximizing the potential AI development. The task of shaping the strategy has been entrusted to The Data Lab, the state-sponsored innovation center for data and AI, opened in 2014. The final text is expected to launch in September 2020.

NASA will send a golf cart-sized robot to the moon in 2022 to search for deposits of water below the surface, an effort to evaluate the vital resource ahead of a planned human return to the moon in 2024 to possibly use it for astronauts to drink and to make rocket fuel, the U.S. space agency said on Friday. The VIPER robot will drive for miles (km) on the dusty lunar surface to get a closer look at what NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has touted for months: underground pockets of "hundreds of millions of tons of water ice" that could help turn the moon into a jumping-off point to Mars. "VIPER is going to assess where the water ice is. We're going to be able to characterize the water ice, and ultimately drill," Bridenstine said on Friday at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington. Because water ice represents something significant.