Going into combat is difficult enough as it is and the last thing you want on the battlefield is to have your equipment break down, especially something as critical as the vehicle that's getting you around. That's why the Army spends millions of dollars every year making sure its infantry vehicles are ready for action. And officials think artificial intelligence could make maintenance more effective by lowering costs and giving commanders a better understanding of their fleets. Last month the Army kicked off a pilot program with Uptake, a Chicago-based industrial technology startup, to test whether the company's AI-powered platform can predict when components on the M2A3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle will break down. If the program is successful, the Army could ultimately scale the technology to the thousands of Bradleys it operates across the globe.

Sharing a name with a famous person can prompt endless jokes and comments -- but in these particularly politically-charged times, having the same name as a political figure can be especially tiresome. That's something a young man from Kentucky named Brett Kavanagh has learned only too well in recent weeks: On Friday, Brett, 27, complained about the recent woes of having his name, prompting others with famous names to commiserate. Women named Siri and Alexa, and men named Michael Jackson and Bruce Lee, all tweeted about how hard it is to have a well-known name. His tweet inspired others to chime in, including this person who pointed to a Scottish man named Steve Bannon -- who is not the same as Breitbart's Steve Bannon A man named Bruce Y. Lee knows the struggle This Brett, who works in customer service and lives in Louisville, spells his last name differently from new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, but it seems their nearly-identical names has caused him some trouble. Tough times: Brett (pictured) doesn't spell his name the same way as the judge, either'This is a terrible time to be named Brett Kavanagh,' he tweeted.

Asset managers are looking for ways to mine alternative data sets for investment ideas, recognizing that stock pickers cannot rely on traditional research. An explosion in alternative data, ranging from satellite images to mobile geolocation data and unstructured text, has created an arms race among hedge funds and quantitative funds. Many firms have hired data scientists to dive into pools of data and to use machine learning algorithms to extract insights or predictive signals. Traditional buy-side firms are also eyeing big data sets while wrestling with how to incorporate them into the investment process. "Alt data is starting to become a little more mainstream in that asset managers realize they need to find new sources of alpha to gain an edge," said Bill Stephenson, managing director of AIR Summit, a conference that was held Sept. 5-6 in New York City.

As Hurricane Florence ground its way through North Carolina, it released what might politely be called an excrement storm. Massive hog farm manure pools washed a stew of dangerous bacteria and heavy metals into nearby waterways. More efficient oversight might have prevented some of the worst effects, but even in the best of times, state and federal environmental regulators are overextended and underfunded. Help is at hand, however, in the form of machine learning--training computers to automatically detect patterns in data--according to Stanford researchers. Their study, published in Nature Sustainability, finds that machine learning techniques could catch two to seven times as many infractions as current approaches, and suggests far-reaching applications for public investments.

Rooted in a research team investigating deep learning at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, SenseTime earned early renown by occasionally beating Google and Facebook in image-recognition competitions. Rapidly expanding on the back of massive rounds of VC, it currently supplies face-recognition tech that the Chinese government plans to use to track citizens through its network of 170 million CCTV cameras, and with which state-owned telecoms behemoth China Mobile will monitor its 300 million users. Banks, prisons, airports, police and retailers are already on the SenseTime client list; it may add autonomous driving and augmented reality to that roster soon.

On Oct. 11, in Washington, Future Tense will host a free screening of WarGames, followed by a discussion with Open Technology Institute director Kevin Bankston and sci-fi author Malka Older. This year, John Badham's WarGames--one of the movies most beloved by hackers, techies, and tech policy wonks (like me!)--celebrates its 35th anniversary. Though it may look a little kitschy now, it was notable for several firsts: It was the first popular film depiction of the now well-known hacker archetype. It raised the specter of an artificial intelligence starting World War III a year before James Cameron's The Terminator did, and it introduced America to a young Matthew Broderick. WarGames is the alternately lighthearted and deadly serious tale of a wargaming A.I. at U.S. missile command that almost sparks a nuclear war after being broken into by a troublesome but well-intentioned teenage hacker.

Finance Minister Asad Umar recently spoke in the National Assembly about amendments to the Finance Bill and hinted at using data and AI to identify tax evaders. "Algorithms are now very advanced. Global tax collection agencies don't rely solely on traditional methods for collection, they use modern technology," he said. "We want to use anonymised data to run algorithms which will help us identify tax evaders." But what algorithms was Umar referring to and how do they work?

"We suffer from a bad case of trust-deficit disorder," said UN Secretary-General António Guterres in his recent General Assembly speech. His diagnosis is right, and his focus on new technological developments underscores their crucial role shaping the future global political order. Indeed, artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to deepen the trust-deficit across the world. The Secretary-General, echoing his recently released Strategy on New Technologies, repeatedly referenced rapidly developing fields of technology in his speech, rightly calling for greater cooperation between countries and among stakeholders, as well as for more diversity in the technology sector. His trust-deficit diagnosis reflects the urgent need to build a new social license and develop incentives to ensure that technological innovation, in particular AI, is deployed safely and aligned with the public interest.

No shortage of articles and reports describe the many problems we face daily as Americans: immigration, natural disasters, wars, racism, sexism, and shootings. It's easy to get lost in the sheer number of crises, paralyzing to even contemplate what do to next. Worse, we can fall into the trap of negativity, overwhelmed by all that must be done to fix our problems. "It's a huge problem in the U.S.," the founder and CEO of Learning Ovations Jay Connor told my coauthor Neil Sahota and I during an interview for our upcoming book, Uber Yourself Before You Get Kodaked: A Modern Primer on A.I. for the Modern Business. "Less than 50 percent of our children are reading at grade level, and if you're dealing with high-need or high-poverty populations, in some locations, like our schools in New York, it's below 20 percent."

The topic of the Fourth Industrial Revolution topped the agenda last month at the World Economic Forum "Summer Davos", where over 2,000 top-level representatives from politics, business, social sectors and the arts gathered in the Chinese municipality of Tianjin. China has been one of the leading countries in this imminent revolution, characterised by cutting-edge new technologies that are "blurring the queues between the physical, digital and biological spheres", according to forum chairman Klaus Schwab. The Made in China 2025 initiative, for example, has set China's vision to take on global leadership in advanced manufacturing and hi-tech industries. China has rid itself of its "copycat" stigma and has emerged as a global innovation hub in business. In 2017, the internet and technology sector – ranging from ride-hailing to e-commerce, robotics and artificial intelligence – grew at 18 per cent, substantially outpacing the overall economy, which grew 6.9 per cent, according to Xinhua.