Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. "Hello, and welcome [to] Mars!" From a flash of blush-tinted light appears Saeed, a shimmering, trim-bearded, space-suited projection of a man, with the disconcerting proportions and awkward gestures of a 2002-era video game character. But it's not 2002--Saeed is the first person you encounter in a virtual reality experience set in 2057, a fanciful ambassador welcoming you, virtual visitor, to your "second home" on Mars. Saeed, and the dusty virtual landscape he guides you through, are creations of the United Arab Emirates. In the fall of 2017, the UAE released this particular VR experience to promote its plans for a mission to Mars (anticipated launch 2021) and the Mars Science City, a simulated habitation slated for construction in the Emirati desert.

Called Summit, the supercomputer has a peak performance of 200,000 trillion calculations per second (or 200 petaflops), and is eight times more powerful than the lab's previous top-ranked system, Titan. For some scientific applications, says ORNL, Summit will be capable of more than three billion billion mixed-precision calculations per second, providing unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials, artificial intelligence (AI), and other domains, enabling scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible. "Today's launch of the Summit supercomputer demonstrates the strength of American leadership in scientific innovation and technology development," said Secretary of Energy Rick Perry on the announcement. "It's going to have a profound impact in energy research, scientific discovery, economic competitiveness and national security." "I am truly excited by the potential of Summit, as it moves the nation one step closer to the goal of delivering an exascale supercomputing system by 2021." said Perry.

Twenty years ago, setting up a timer to record on a tape your favourite TV show using a VCR device or recording a message on your voicemail was a total success in technology automation. Even the simple task of programming a digital alarm clock to wake us up at a certain time in the morning stopped being rocket science for some of us, fulfilling an inner desire to be part of a society that was unstoppably shifting into a digital transformation. This is just a small slice of how technology automation has changed over the past 20 years, and I assume we can all acknowledge that AI is gaining momentum, albeit regulatory authorities, legislators and lawyers not being fully sure how to adapt or embrace the change that's currently happening. Artificial Intelligence is here, it's the hot topic or the popular kid everyone wants to play in the park with. AI and automation are bringing us daily benefits; Internet and Big Data are becoming an essential part of both our work and private lives and we now have the capacity to collect huge sums of information too cumbersome for a person to process.

Face recognition is a stark example of a technology that is being deployed faster than society and the law can adopt new norms and rules. It lets governments and private enterprise track citizens anywhere there is a camera, even if they're not carrying any devices. In general, people who are in public don't have any legal expectation of privacy and can be photographed or recorded. Because of this, the technology has the potential to be more intrusive than phone tracking, the legality of which the U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide. There are only two states, Texas and Illinois, that limit private companies' ability to track people via their faces.

Amazon staff have called on founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos to stop sales of AWS Rekognition facial recognition tech to U.S. law enforcement. Amazon employees have written a letter to CEO Jeff Bezos in which they ask the company to stop selling its facial recognition tool to American law enforcement. The tech giant's sales to U.S. cops was revealed by an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) investigation earlier this month, as it emerged Amazon Web Services' Rekognition tool was shipped to police in Florida and Oregon. The cost of the tool was also revealed to be remarkably low, as evidenced by a Forbes test of the product, in which a facial recognition project was set up for free across the publication's Jersey City and London offices. In a letter posted to an internal forum, first revealed by The Hill and published in full by Gizmodo, some employees expressed the same concerns as the ACLU about the power of Amazon's Rekognition being abused by American officers.

The discipline, which up until recently was restricted to academic research and applications, is finally becoming part of everyday life. They might not be able to tell you what it is, but they will know that it's permeated all sorts of industries. In education, platforms like Century are helping teachers provide more personalised education programmes and receive feedback. In the legal service industry, AI is helping lawyers to do legal searches and draft the best standard documents. In travel, companies are developing fully autonomous systems that diagnose potential problems for driverless cars and identify the most logical routes.

Countries in the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) are lagging behind with respect to robotics, artificial intelligence and technology infrastructure and skills acquisition. Jean Baptiste Mutabazi, the regional bloc's Director of Infrastructure, noted this during the COMESA Connect Industry Dialogue in Kigali themed "Smart Technologies for Sustainable Businesses." Held in Kigali, the meeting was organised by the COMESA Business Council and Rwanda's Private Sector Federation of Rwanda (PSF). While Egypt, Seychelles, Kenya and Mauritius lead in terms of internet penetration and mobile density and in trade in ICT services, Mutabazi said, the rest of the region largely lags behind in a number of ways, particularly with respect to robotics, artificial intelligence and technology infrastructure and skills acquisition. COMESA member states are; Burundi, the Comoros, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Rwanda, Sudan, Swaziland, Seychelles, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Russian scientists are developing an advanced automated submarine that will be powered by an external combustion engine, Igor Denisov, deputy director of the Foundation for Advanced Studies (FPI), revealed in an interview with Interfax, a Russian news agency. "We are planning to create an apparatus that will pass through the Northern Sea Route without floating up and without the use of nuclear power, including under the ice," Denisov said. "In order for this device to accomplish such a'feat,' its autonomy should be at least 90 days, which is already commensurate with the autonomy of modern submarines." The decision to forego the nuclear option to power the underwater vehicle was a conscious one, Denisov said, in order to make it increasingly safe. While a nuclear installation helps power submarines for uninterrupted movement throughout the world's oceans, it also puts its operational capabilities at risk.

In April 2017, the US Department of Defense launched an Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, otherwise known as Project Maven. The project uses Google's artificial intelligence to analyse drone footage. This did not go down well with Google's employees. More than 3,000 workers signed an open letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, asking the company to pull out of the program, writing that "Google should not be in the business of war". In early June 2018, reports surfaced that Google had informed employees it would not renew its contract for Project Maven, and days afterwards, Pichai published the blog post AI at Google: our principles, which laid out seven objectives for AI applications to guide Google's work going forward.

A group of Amazon employees has penned a letter to company chief Jeff Bezos, asking him to stop selling facial recognition to law enforcement. They said that "in the midst of historic militarization of police, renewed targeting of Black activists, and the growth of a federal deportation force currently engaged in human rights abuses," Amazon's facial recognition software will surely serve as a powerful surveillance tool for the government. They also pointed out that a tool like it will "ultimately serve to harm the most marginalized." The employees wrote the letter after an American Civil Liberties Union investigation revealed that the tech giant sells its Rekognition facial detection system to law enforcement customers. Orlando's police chief admitted that the city's cops are testing the software in their headquarters and in a few places downtown.