In January, Amazon opened Amazon Go, a high-tech, cashierless convenience store in Seattle. There are no checkout lines and few employees. The only requirement to shop is downloading an app. Customers just walk in, load up their bags, and go. There's no need to even scan purchases; cameras positioned overhead take note of items in customers' carts and add them to a virtual bill. Amazon Go is both an interesting novelty -- and a profound challenge to the livelihoods of the more than 3.5 million Americans who work as cashiers. Rumors of a coming wave of similar stores and robot-run factories have provoked apocalyptic predictions of mass unemployment among pundits and politicians.

The scorching heatwave gripping northern Europe was made twice as likely to happen by climate change, scientists have revealed. An initial assessment of the prolonged period of record-breaking hot weather suggests rising temperatures caused by human activity increased the odds of it happening. The preliminary research claims to have found'unambiguous' evidence that human interference has triggered the recent heatwave, which computer models predict will continue until the end of August. People enjoy the Bournemouth beach in Dorset, England, as the hot weather continues across Britain. Britain is experiencing a severe heatwave which has prompted its national weather service to issue an alert for people to'stay out of the sun' 'The logic that climate change will do this is inescapable – the world is becoming warmer and so heatwaves like this are becoming more common,' said one of the authors Dr Friederike Otto, deputy director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford and and part of the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium that did the latest research.

A Saudi-led coalition has launched air raids on Yemen's Hodeidah, in an apparent resumption of military operations on the strategic Red Sea city after Houthi rebels attacked two Saudi oil tankers and one of the United Arab Emirates' (UAE) main airports. The Houthi-run al-Masirah TV said in a series of tweets on Friday that coalition air strikes had targeted a radio station inside the city and a fishing pier. There were no immediate reports of casualties. The latest offensive on the port city of Hodeidah came a day after Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for a drone attack on Abu Dhabi's international airport. According to the Al-Masirah television channel, the Sammad-3 drone launched three attacks on the airport.

It's hard to get lawmakers to understand privacy issues, let alone commit to taking action. Yet in one day, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) pulled off an incredible feat. They showed the public how facial recognition technology can lead to false and biased accusations. By the afternoon, two prominent members of Congress sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos demanding an immediate meeting. The Congressmen were angry at the results of a report which showed that Amazon's facial recognition software, Rekognition, had identified 28 legislators as potential criminals.

Human beings have been fascinated with mind-reading for centuries. The reasons are obvious -- our imaginations are captured by the gift of being able to understand what is going on inside the brain. Today, with the global risk of cyberattack, that ability is not a novelty but something essential to global security. Think of "what is going on inside the brain" in a broad context. It's not the brain of the now-infamous 400-pound hacker I'm speaking of, but the distributed intelligence of millions of nano-brains -- highly-evolved bots.

In the early to mid-90's while my friends were getting into Indie Rock, I was hacking away at robots and getting them to learn to map a room. A computer science graduate student, I programmed LISP algorithms for parsing nursing records in order to predict intervention codes. I was no less a nerd (or to put it a better way, a technology enthusiast) in law school, when I wrote about how natural language processing can improve legal research tools. I didn't put much thought, either as a computer scientist or law student to whether artificial intelligence (AI) should be regulated. Frankly, we were in such the early days of the technology, that AI regulations seemed like science fiction a la Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics.

Technology moves at breakneck speed, and we now have more power in our pockets than we had in our homes in the 1990s. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a fascinating concept of science fiction for decades, but many researchers think we're finally getting close to making AI a reality. NPR notes that in the last few years, scientists have made breakthroughs in "machine learning," using neural networks, which mimic the processes of real neurons. This is a type of "deep learning" that allows machines to process information for themselves on a very sophisticated level, allowing them to perform complex functions like facial recognition. Big data is speeding up the AI development process, and we may be seeing more integration of AI technology in our everyday lives relatively soon.

Artificial intelligence has become such a catchy selling point for online services that some companies have turned to a bit of sleight of hand -- and voice -- to convince people they have smart machines working for them. Several companies have employed humans to impersonate chatbots performing scheduling and other services. A prototype for Facebook's AI assistant for Messenger, called M, had people behind the curtain calling M's shots for two and a half years before taking humans out of the equation in January. Amazon's Mechanical Turk reportedly used people to transcribe some expense and benefits documents Amazon's touted SmartScan software was supposed to be doing but couldn't handle. To anyone who has dreaded the labyrinthine house of mirrors automated call systems have become, it might seem odd companies want to pretend to have a machine on the other end of the line rather than a human, but there are several factors at play.

The UK government is using a type of artificial intelligence that can detect emotion on social media to measure and understand how people feel on certain topics. Web science firm FlyingBinary has released the "artificial emotional intelligence" service to the government's G-Cloud marketplace, in partnership with emotional AI recognition company Emrays B.V. "The web has become a noisy space as online content grows exponentially," said Professor Jacqui Taylor, CEO of FlyingBinary. "Where once tools were in the hands of a social team it is increasingly difficult for humans using social media monitoring to understand the signals about a brand, initiatives, good news or issues." "This service uses AI technology to understand digital content from an emotional perspective and how resonant this is with an online audience before content is shared online." The two companies have deployed the artificial emotional intelligence engine as part of a newly awarded G-Cloud 10 service built for the UK government.

While artificial intelligence was once heralded as the key to unlocking a new era of economic prosperity, policymakers today face a wave of calls to ensure AI is fair, ethical and safe. New York City Mayor de Blasio recently announced the formation of the nation's first task force to monitor and assess the use of algorithms. Days later, the European Union enacted sweeping new data protection rules that require companies be able to explain to consumers any automated decisions. And high-profile critics, like Elon Musk, have called on policymakers to do more to regulate AI. Unfortunately, the two most popular ideas -- requiring companies to disclose the source code to their algorithms and explain how they make decisions -- would cause more harm than good by regulating the business models and the inner workings of the algorithms of companies using AI, rather than holding these companies accountable for outcomes. The first idea -- "algorithmic transparency" -- would require companies to disclose the source code and data used in their AI systems.