On February 6, 2018, Elon Musk's SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy rocket, the largest ever, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Its cargo was a Tesla Roadster, which is now orbiting the sun somewhere between Mars and the asteroid belt. Between Elon Musk's numerous companies and passion projects (SpaceX, Tesla, Solar City, the Hyperloop, the Boring Company), and the quickly proceeding advances in VR/AR/MR, genetics/cloning, blockchain, AI, 3D printing, and other fields, someone who was in a coma since 1998 and just woke up yesterday would be forgiven for thinking they had jumped a hundred years into the future instead of a mere 20. But then this person would actually get up and go out into the real world and see that mostly everything else is the same, aside from more traffic on the roads, more people in general, most of whom now carry miniature computers with them wherever they go that are more powerful than any desktop from the 20th century. Born in apartheid-era South Africa, he lived the first 16 years of his life in various towns, including Pretoria, moving back and forth between divorced parents.

The Energy Department unveiled plans to launch a $5.5 million research center that will bring together top thinkers from three federal and academic institutions to solve some of the world's most complex challenges in artificial intelligence. Researchers from Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and the Georgia Institute of Technology will join forces in the newly unveiled Center for Artificial Intelligence-Focused Architectures and Algorithms, or ARIAA. "AI will allow us to solve problems today, that simply cannot be solved because they are too complex," said Roberto Gioiosa, the senior research scientist at PNNL selected lead the new center. "This is the science of the future." The move follows Energy Secretary Rick Perry's recent announcement that the agency is working to establish an Artificial Intelligence and Technology Office to coordinate and streamline the agency's efforts and growing investments around AI.

It depends on the exact definition of justice, perhaps. The computerization/mechanisation of the public sector has largely been driven by the hope that logical government (deterministic decisions, given certain input deterministic output) will make society more "just" and "equal" (i.e. a computer does not have the social sensitivity to discriminate, for instance, and even when it does - for instance through statistical short-comings - we can normally measure and assess the discrimination that occurs). But we are now half a century in to computerization - has it worked? I think "lasagna-style" technologies, which are vertically separated as a matter of technology, are more likely to lead to an outcome of increased "justice". Because I think of justice as something which guarantees to individuals freedom to act - commercially and socially - and this freedom can only be obtained if market entry barriers are low, or if technologies lend themselves to a multitude of entities cooperating on different levels.

Artificial intelligence could be destabilizing the internet news ecosystem. And according to billionaire Elon Musk, social media is the first to fall prey. Elon Musk tweeted early Thursday morning that "advanced AI" will be used to "manipulate social media" -- if, he opined, it hasn't done so already. He added that "anonymous bot swarms" are "evolving rapidly." It's unclear what exactly Musk was referring to when he warned about "advanced AI" and "anonymous bot swarms."

RoMan, short for Robotic Manipulator, is a tracked robot that is easily recognized by its robotic arms and hands -- necessary appendages to remove heavy objects and other road debris from military vehicles' paths.What's harder to detect is the amount of effort that went into programming the robot to manipulate complex environments. The exercise was one of several recent integration events involving a decade of research led by scientists and engineers at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory who teamed with counterparts from the NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, University of Washington, University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University and General Dynamics Land Systems. As part of ARL's Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance, the work focused on state-of-the-art basic and applied research related to ground robotics technologies with an overarching goal of developing autonomy in support of manned-unmanned teaming. Research within the RCTA program serves as foundational research in support of future combat ground vehicles. The recent robot exercise was the culmination of research to develop a robot that reasons about unknown objects and their physical properties, and decides how to best interact with different objects to achieve a specific task.

SOC analysts are under siege to keep pace with the ever-changing threat landscape. The analysts are overworked, burnout and bombarded with the sheer number of alerts that they must carefully investigate. This intense workload can be a true testament against anyone's patience. We need to empower our SOC analysts to overcome this monotonous work that is leading to career burnout. Our industry is struggling to keep up and is alternatively promoting silver bullets and panaceas to catch zero days, defend against APT and use AI to detect attacks better and faster.

The Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures could prevent law enforcement from applying increasingly sophisticated surveillance and predictive policing technology, including "superhuman" methods employing artificial intelligence, according to a professor at the University of California-Davis School of Law. In an essay published in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Elizabeth E. Joh argues that the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Carpenter v United States established a precedent for using the Fourth Amendment to limit the use of emerging technology, ranging from drones that help patrol borders to predictive-analytic software that can determine when and where the next crime will occur. In that landmark case, decided this summer, the Court ruled law enforcement cannot access citizens' cellphone location records without a search warrant. Although the decision focused on whether information held by "third parties" such as cellphone providers was subject to privacy protections guaranteed under the Constitution, Joh said it also touched on the changing "nature of policing" specifically the technologically enhanced means law enforcement can now exploit to gather information in the cyber era. In the Carpenter case, justices were asked to rule on whether FBI agents sidestepped their constitutional obligations to show "probable cause" for obtaining a search warrant to retrieve the locational data of a suspected serial robber's cellphone to prove he was near the scene of stores in the Detroit area where thefts had occurred.

In November 2017, a Reddit account called deepfakes posted pornographic clips made with software that pasted the faces of Hollywood actresses over those of the real performers. Nearly two years later, deepfake is a generic noun for video manipulated or fabricated with artificial intelligence software. The technique has drawn laughs on YouTube, along with concern from lawmakers fearful of political disinformation. Yet a new report that tracked the deepfakes circulating online finds they mostly remain true to their salacious roots. Startup Deeptrace took a kind of deepfake census during June and July to inform its work on detection tools it hopes to sell to news organizations and online platforms.

Cybersecurity faces an emerging threat generally known as deepfakes, Malicious uses of AI generated synthetic media, the most powerful cyber-weapon in history, is just around the corner. The cybersecurity industry has only a short time to get ahead of it before it challenges public trust in reality. In response to this scary thought, Hany Farid, the "father" of digital image forensics, told The Washington Post, "Increasingly accessible tools for creating convincing fake videos are a deadly virus. However, the number of people working on the video-synthesis side, as opposed to the detector side, is 100 to 1." Nation-states and Hollywood VFX artists have been able to manipulate media since the very beginning of media, but today anyone can download deepfake software and create convincing fake videos in their spare time because the cost of producing these new forms of synthetic media has decreased significantly. It will soon be as easy to create a fake video as it is to add an Instagram filter.

The UK will be the first government to test a new set of artificial intelligence (AI) procurement guidelines, which have been developed by global public-private cooperation body the World Economic Forum (WEF). AI Procurement Guidelines for Governments sets out the requirements civil servants should address before acquiring and deploying AI software and services; provides questions they should ask companies about their products, and how they use and process data; and makes recommendations for the implementation of AI. According to WEF – which co-designed the guidelines as part of its Unlocking Public Sector AI project – civil servants often lack experience in acquiring emerging technologies, and many public institutions are cautious about harnessing AI at a time when "we are only beginning to understand the risks as well as the opportunities". It said growing public concerns around bias, privacy, accountability and transparency in the use of AI have added an extra layer of complexity to its roll-out at a national level, and that the guidelines have been designed to help civil servants keep up with the rapidly-developing technology and mitigate the associated risks. The aim is to help governments make efficiencies through the responsible use of AI and prepare for future risks, while enabling established companies and start-ups to compete on a level playing field for government contracts.