The European Union could spend up to £440 million ($590 million) on killer robots that wage warfare without the need for human assistance. Officially known as Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWs), the robots use artificial intelligence to target and kill enemies without human involvement. Brussels has decided to allow bankrolling of the controversial machines through the EU defence fund despite MEPs' attempts to bar LAWs from the kitty. The European Union could spend up to £440 million ($590 million) on killer robots that wage warfare without the need for human assistance. The parliament had wanted to block EU subsidies of the weapons but conceded in talks on Tuesday in order to strike a compromise, two sources who were in the room told the EUObserver.

An autonomous Uber car spotted a pedestrian about six seconds before fatally hitting her but did not stop because the system used to automatically apply brakes in potentially dangerous situations had been disabled, US federal investigators said. In a preliminary report on the crash, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said emergency braking manoeuvres are not enabled while Uber's cars are under computer control "to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behaviour". Instead, Uber relies on a human backup driver to intervene but the system is not designed to alert the driver. In the crash in March, the driver began steering less than a second before impact but did not brake until less than a second after impact, according to the preliminary report, which does not determine fault. A video of the crash showed the driver looking down just before the vehicle struck and killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona.

Uber's self-driving vehicles operating in Arizona were unprepared to safely encounter pedestrians and were fatally over-reliant on the mindfulness of human operators, a federal accident report released Thursday shows. On March 18, Uber's Volvo XC90 was being driven by software but supervised by a human attendant in the driver's seat when it hit and killed Elaine Herzberg, who was crossing the darkened road with her bicycle. It was the first fatal crash involving a vehicle driven by a computer, a technology that promises long-term safety improvements but has been rushed into road testing by a handful of companies despite questions about transparency and reliability. According to the preliminary report of the National Transportation Safety Board, Uber's sensors first perceived Herzberg about six seconds before impact--more than twice the commonly accepted reaction-time of 2.5 seconds. But the sensors struggled to classify Herzberg (first as an unknown object, then as a car, then as a bicycle) and determine her expected path across the road.

The initial report by the National Transportation Safety Board on the fatal self-driving Uber crash in March confirms that the car detected the pedestrian as early as 6 seconds before the crash, but did not slow or stop because its emergency braking systems were deliberately disabled. Uber told the NTSB that "emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control, to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior," in other words to ensure a smooth ride. "The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator." It's not clear why the emergency braking capability even exists if it is disabled while the car is in operation. The Volvo model's built-in safety systems -- collision avoidance and emergency braking, among other things -- are also disabled while in autonomous mode.

Learning to See: You are what you see is Memo Akten's ongoing series working with Machine Learning algorithms. In this project, he reflects on the data sets that are fed into these algorithms and how they make use question the way our personal realities are constructed. He says, "The picture we see in our conscious minds is not a direct representation of the outside world, or of what our senses deliver, but is of a simulated world, reconstructed based on our expectations and prior beliefs." Watching the results of these machines "learning to see", you start to wonder how the results would differ by swapping the dataset, as Akten does with The Google Art Dataset, images from the Hubble Space Telescope, and search images from Donald Trump, Theresa May, among other politicians. In a way, we get a glimpse into how the world could be perceived if visual history took a different path.

An autonomous Uber vehicle's emergency braking system was switched off in the critical seconds before the car fatally struck a pedestrian in Arizona earlier this year, a report found. The lethal March crash was the first known time a self-driving vehicle killed a pedestrian, and it raised grave questions about the future of the burgeoning autonomous vehicle industry. In the aftermath, Uber has suspended its self-driving car initiative in Arizona. In a preliminary report detailing how the accident occurred, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) noted that the car was equipped with an automatic emergency braking that does not function when the car is being controlled by its computer system, relying instead on a human to take over. Self-driving cars like the one involved in the crash have an autonomous mode, in which a computer does the driving, and a manual mode in which a human backup driver takes over.

A federal investigation into a self-driving Uber SUV that hit and killed a pedestrian in March has found that the vehicle's emergency braking system was disabled. The preliminary report, issued by the National Transportation Safety Board, said on Thursday that while the vehicle's guidance system had spotted the woman about six seconds before hitting her, emergency braking manoeuvres were not enabled in order to "reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior". Instead, the Uber system anticipated that the human back-up driver would intervene. However, the automated system was not designed to alert the driver of the impending danger. The car was traveling at 43 miles per hour and its sensors determined that braking was needed 1.3 seconds before impact, according to the report.

The current cyber environment is chock-full of data breaches, ransomware attacks, cryptocurrency thefts, and online proxy wars. The choice way to combat cybersecurity threats is to use advanced machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) software.

The autonomous Uber SUV that struck and killed an Arizona pedestrian in March spotted the woman about six seconds before hitting her, but did not stop because the system used to automatically apply brakes in potentially dangerous situations had been disabled, according to federal investigators. In a preliminary report on the crash, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday that emergency braking is not enabled while Uber's cars are under computer control, "to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior." Instead, Uber relies on a human backup driver to intervene. The system, however, is not designed to alert the driver. In the crash, the driver began steering less than a second before impact but didn't brake until less than a second after impact, according to the preliminary report, which does not determine fault.

Today, the NTSB released preliminary findings for an accident back in March, in which a self-driving Uber vehicle collided with a pedestrian. "At 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that emergency braking was needed to mitigate a collision," the release says. "According to Uber emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior. The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator." "Over the course of the last two months, we've worked closely with the NTSB," an Uber spokesperson told Engadget.