Devaki Raj leaned over a gilded railing inside Times Square's Marriott Marquis last Thursday, racking her brain to find the words that won't get her in trouble. Minutes before, she had stood confidently in front of a conference room full of investors, academics, military contractors, and Air Force acquisitions officers to deliver a slick pitch as part of the Air Force's first ever startup demo day. In her pitch, Raj explained how her company, CrowdAI, has mixed machine learning with mapping technology to identify flooded Texas roadways in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, or decimated buildings after bombings in Aleppo. The pitch, delivered to a closed-door crowd the day before, had already earned CrowdAI a small grant from the Air Force, which she hopes will soon blossom into a formal military contract. But now, Raj was finding it trickier to answer my questions about what this technology might be used for in practice by the military--or in war. When I asked if there are some applications of the tool that she would consider off limits, she said yes, but declined to name any in particular.

In March 2017, President Trump issued an executive order expediting the deployment of biometric verification of the identities of all travelers crossing US borders. That mandate stipulates facial recognition identification for "100 percent of all international passengers," including American citizens, in the top 20 US airports by 2021. Now, the United States Department of Homeland Security is rushing to get those systems up and running at airports across the country. But it's doing so in the absence of proper vetting, regulatory safeguards, and what some privacy advocates argue is in defiance of the law. According to 346 pages of documents obtained by the nonprofit research organization Electronic Privacy Information Center -- shared exclusively with BuzzFeed News and made public on Monday as part of Sunshine Week -- US Customs and Border Protection is scrambling to implement this "biometric entry-exit system," with the goal of using facial recognition technology on travelers aboard 16,300 flights per week -- or more than 100 million passengers traveling on international flights out of the United States -- in as little as two years, to meet Trump's accelerated timeline for a biometric system that had initially been signed into law by the Obama administration.

The US Navy has selected Boeing to develop a fleet of massive drone submarines under a $43 million new contract. Over the next few years, the firm will design and test four Orca Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (XLUUVs) based on its autonomous Echo Voyager, which can operate at sea for months at a time. The robotic submarines will be modular, meaning they can easily adapted in the future to implement'cost-effective upgrades' and support a variety of missions. Boeing is expected to complete the vehicles by June 2022. Boeing has been chosen to develop four drone submarines, called Orca Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (XLUUVs), for the US Navy.

The great rivalry of the 20th century, at least from the America perspective, was between the United States and the Soviet Union. Geopolitical chroniclers see the great rivalry of the 21st century as between the United States and China. In the nine months between his inauguration and 9/11, President George W. Bush advanced the idea of China as America's peer competitor. President Barack Obama executed the "pivot to Asia," based on the argument that while the U.S. was mired in the Middle East, the most important global shifts were taking place in Asia. Today, the U.S. and China are increasingly rival superpowers, albeit deeply interdependent frenemies.

The E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System is a joint Air Force - Army program. The Joint STARS uses a multi-mode side looking radar to detect, track, and classify moving ground vehicles in all conditions deep behind enemy lines. The Air Force is massively speeding up a new networked surveillance system intended to collect, organize and disseminate pressing attack information in extremely high-risk environments including enemy stealth fighters, advanced air defenses and armed drones. "We do not want to recap JSTARS but create that same capability that protects soldiers and marines on the move. We want to replicate the technology, yet make it survivable," William Roper, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, Acquisition, Technology & Logistics, told an audience recently at an Air Force Association Symposium.

Zebra Medical Vision recently revealed that two of its imaging products had received CE certification in Europe, to expedite diagnosis and review of critical conditions, especially in medical imaging. The company's AI technology has the potential of flagging time-sensitive cases like brain bleed in CT scans and pneumothorax in chest X-rays. According to the company, the technology minimizes the duration taken by ER staff and radiologists in identifying critical conditions by 80 percent. As such, it helps in improving the timeliness and quality of treatment. The imaging analytics engine from Zebra not only links to any given medical picture archive system but also analyzes the necessary scans using its algorithms.

They further say, as a result, we need to rely on the government to support the population via universal basic income or UBI. Even Bill Gates who has transformed the world through tech innovation argued we should tax robots to slow innovation and use the money to hire people. Virtually all the other top tech billionaires and Warren Buffet seem to agree. But as we mentioned above, the experts seem to be very wrong about so many major predictions. It is actually very difficult to think of predictions that they got right.

Finding the best light-harvesting chemicals for use in solar cells can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. Over the years, researchers have developed and tested thousands of different dyes and pigments to see how they absorb sunlight and convert it to electricity. Sorting through all of them requires an innovative approach. Now, thanks to a study that combines the power of supercomputing with data science and experimental methods, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Cambridge in England have developed a novel "design to device" approach to identify promising materials for dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). DSSCs can be manufactured with low-cost, scalable techniques, allowing them to reach competitive performance-to-price ratios.

The web is under threat – and the world needs to do more to help save it, its creator has warned. Tim Berners-Lee first proposed what would become the world wide web 30 years ago today and has called on the public and politicians to "come together" to help it survive in a good state in the future, he said. The anniversary – commemorated in a Google Doodle and by events around the world – is "a moment to celebrate how far we've come, but also an opportunity to reflect on how far we have yet to go", he said in a letter. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view.

If, by some chance, you find yourself in Mark Cuban's bathroom, make sure to check out the reading materials. "If you go in my bathroom, there's a book, Machine Learning for Idiots," Cuban said on the latest episode of Recode Media. "Whenever I get a break, I'm reading it." That means everyone, including and especially business owners, are at risk if they don't educate themselves now. "There'll be a time when people take AI and its impact for granted, but if you don't know how to use it and you don't understand it and you can't at least at have a basic understanding of the different approaches and how the algorithms work, you can be blindsided in ways you couldn't even possibly imagine," Cuban said. "Algorithms are a function, literally, of the people who write them. Whoever they are, whatever they are, that's what you're going to get," he added. "If you don't know any better, it's like if you just had somebody who wrote software and didn't know anything about your business. There's going to be all kinds of risks involved. You have to understand it." You can listen to Recode Media wherever you get your podcasts -- including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Overcast. Below, we've shared a lightly edited full transcript of Peter's conversation with Mark, recorded live at Vox Media's The Deep End at South by Southwest 2019. I do a lot of these interviews now, either on a stage like this or at our own conferences or podcasts, and the thing I've learned over years is the best guest you can ever have is a billionaire who owns his or her own company because they can say whatever they want. So that's what we set up for you today. You answer your own emails. You know, I'm talented like that. Thank you for doing that. I'm not going to ask you if you are running for president. Because that's a boring ... I'm gonna get a boring answer. If you did run for president, like everyone else at South By Southwest, what would you campaign on? You put me on the spot. Let's just start by what I think is important, right, and I'm not a candidate so I don't give a shit if you like it or don't like it. First is common sense, right? Second is trying to bring people together.