In a move inspired by natural engineering, robotics researchers have demonstrated how tiny palm-size drones can forcefully tug objects 40 times their own mass by anchoring themselves to the ground or to walls. It's a glimpse into how small drones could more actively manipulate their environment in a way similar to humans or larger robots. "Teams of these drones could work cooperatively to perform more complex manipulation tasks," says Matt Estrada, a PhD student in mechanical engineering at Stanford University. "We demonstrated opening a door, but this approach could be extended to turning a ball valve, moving a piece of debris, or retrieving an object of interest from a disaster zone." Winged creatures such as birds, bats, and insects can only lift objects that are about five times their own weight when flying. But Estrada and his colleagues from Stanford University and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland looked instead to the practical approach taken by predatory wasps, which land on the ground to drag larger prey back to their nests.

Future AI may be super powerful but, as Dr. Joanna Bryson of the University of Bath relates, that still won't make it a person. The desire to bestow human life on inanimate material has been a component of our collective imagination since at least the days of Ovid. In his work Metamorphoses he relates the tale of Pygmalion, who sculpted Galatea out of ivory and besought her animation at the hands of Aphrodite. Two thousand years later, we still see that narrative trope playing itself out in stories such as Alex Garland's Oscar-winning film Ex Machina, where an AI developer creates an autonomous female android named Ava as the key component of a Turing Test. From marriage to murder, the finales of these and other similar stories range from wish fulfillment to cautionary tale, but the psychological underpinnings remain the same: the aspiration to take something intrinsically non-human (such as ivory or silicon) and humanize it.

From the windows of Ginkgo Bioworks' Boston offices you can peer down into a grimy vestige of the city's past. Across the street, workers in yellow-slicker overalls scrub, scrape, and repair the decks of worn-out warships and ocean tankers parked in a drydock. During World War II, 50,000 people worked the docks and the eight-story waterside warehouse that Ginkgo now calls home. Inside the synthetic biology company's glass-walled foundries, humans are now less obvious, with algorithms designing industrial organisms and robot armies building them in humming, hypnotic synchronicity. "Biology's ability to make atomically precise products is far superior to the best manufacturing systems humans have ever built," says Ginkgo CEO Jason Kelly.

Why the American Civil Liberties Union is calling out Amazon's facial recognition tool. Amazon pitched its facial-recognition system to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials this summer as a way for the agency to target or identify immigrants, according to newly disclosed emails released this week. The emails, which were first published by the Daily Beast, were revealed as part of a Freedom of Information Act request by the advocacy group Project on Government Oversight, show that officials from ICE and Amazon discussed using the tech giant's controversial Rekognition face-scanning platform to assist with homeland security work. An Amazon Web Services official writes in one of the emails: "We are ready and willing to support the vital (Homeland Security Investigations) mission." Amazon Web Services, which develops and sells cloud computing, told The Washington Post in a statement, "We participated with a number of other technology companies in technology'boot camps' sponsored by McKinsey Company, where a number of technologies were discussed, including Rekognition."

On October 23, 2018, Canadian tech leaders will gather at the Rotman School of Management's Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), located at the University of Toronto, for the fourth annual Machine Learning and the Market for Intelligence conference. Since its inception, the conference has brought together top experts in AI to share and discuss the future of AI and its impact on the economy. During the 2016 conference, Shivon Zilis, Project Director, Office of the CEO at Tesla and Neuralink, previous Partner and continued supporter of Bloomberg Beta, and Founding Fellow of the CDL AI Stream and the CDL Quantum Machine Learning Stream, gave the conference attendees a detailed overview of the AI landscape in Canada. Canada has a unique data advantage and a healthy academic environment for bringing up the next generation of AI talent. It is clear that AI is critical to economic growth.

The summit is scheduled to hold on Wednesday, 10 October 2018 at the Oriental Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos and with the theme, "New Algorithms for the Financially Excluded Segment". This is a broad based stakeholder session focused on understanding emerging trends and advanced data analytics use cases applied to issues of financial inclusion. Leading the plenary and discussions are leading local and international experts like Adebisi Shonubi, MD/CEO, NIBSS; Dr (Mrs) Yinka David-West, Director, Lagos Business School; Matt Grasser, Director, Inclusive Fintech, Bankable Frontiers Associate, USA; Temitope Akin-Fadeyi and Head Financial Inclusion Secretariat, Central Bank of Nigeria; Ekow Duker. The one-day Summit will be followed by a five-day residential, all-expenses-paid Artificial Intelligence bootcamp and hackathon on emerging trends in machine learning and deep learning between 10 and 14 October 2018. The goal is to build world-class capacity in advanced data analytics, upskill financial inclusion data analysts and researchers in emerging best practices, and to support the development of contextually relevant algorithm and tech innovation.

We owe a lot to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies. The 60-year-old agency proposed and prototyped the precursor to the world wide web. It developed an interactive mapping solution akin to Google Maps. But it's also one of the birthplaces of machine learning, a kind of artificial intelligence (AI) that mimics the behavior of neurons in the brain. Dr. Brian Pierce, director of DARPA's Innovation Office, spoke about the agency's recent efforts at VB Summit 2018.

"AI has become a major sight of focus of interest, in the media and elsewhere," said Allan Dafoe, director of the governance of AI programme at the University of Oxford, at a hearing in the European Parliament. "Much of this interest is driven by hype and misunderstanding, but it is my belief that the critical insight that AI will be an important technology of this century is correct. In fact I would argue that how we build advanced AI will be the defining development of the 21st century," he added. It is clear that Europe is looking for a way to benefit from the advantages that AI can bring, but also that it will try to shape the development of AI to mitigate some of its possible negative effects. So why is AI such a prominently discussed topic all of a sudden?

Here in 2018, big data is a big deal in China, and nowhere is this truer than in Guizhou, a remote, impoverished province in southwestern China where the provincial government is trying to build a big data industry from scratch. As He Yuan -- a manager at the Shanghai-based company Beige Big Data, which has an office in Guizhou -- put it to me in a recent visit to the province: "Everyone wants a piece of big data … Many still haven't figured out what the term means, exactly." Despite this lingering confusion, the Chinese government seems fully invested in what The New York Times columnist David Brooks refers to as "data-ism" -- the belief that "everything that can be measured should be measured; that data is a transparent and reliable lens that allows us to filter out emotionalism and ideology; that data will help us do remarkable things -- like foretell the future." And Guizhou -- a province less commonly associated with cutting-edge technology and more often with rugged mountains, poor soil, and extreme poverty -- is trying to position itself at the forefront of this nationwide push. Yet for all its leaders' grand ambitions, several hurdles remain to be overcome.

The conversation about unconscious bias in artificial intelligence often focuses on algorithms that unintentionally cause disproportionate harm to entire swaths of society--those that wrongly predict black defendants will commit future crimes, for example, or facial-recognition technologies developed mainly by using photos of white men that do a poor job of identifying women and people with darker skin. But the problem could run much deeper than that. Society should be on guard for another twist: the possibility that nefarious actors could seek to attack artificial intelligence systems by deliberately introducing bias into them, smuggled inside the data that helps those systems learn. This could introduce a worrisome new dimension to cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns or the proliferation of fake news. According to a U.S. government study on big data and privacy (PDF), biased algorithms could make it easier to mask discriminatory lending, hiring or other unsavory business practices.