"We're entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is saying anything at any point in time -- even if they would never say those things," says "Obama," his lips moving in perfect sync with his words as they become increasingly bizarre. "So, for instance, they could have me say things like, I don't know, [Black Panther's] Killmonger was right! Or Ben Carson is in the sunken place! Or, how'bout this: Simply, President Trump is a total and complete dipshit." As the video soon reveals, the man speaking is not the former commander-in-chief, but rather Oscar-winning filmmaker Jordan Peele with a warning for viewers about trusting material they encounter online.

The US Army is developing a machine learning method for identifying faces from thermal imagery. Soon the American government will be able to film people from outside of buildings, using cameras that can see through walls in near-total darkness, and an AI will recognize the people in the images. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) scientists Benjamin S. Riggan, Nathaniel J. Short, and Shuowen Hu recently released a white paper detailing military efforts to develop a method for applying facial recognition technology to images taken using thermal imaging devices. When using thermal cameras to capture facial imagery, the main challenge is that the captured thermal image must be matched against a watch list or gallery that only contains conventional visible imagery from known persons of interest. Such devices are common, especially in military use.

COLUMBUS, OHIO – Ohio crews cleaning up a massive former Cold War-era uranium enrichment plant in Ohio plan this summer to deploy a high-tech helper: an autonomous, radiation-measuring robot that will roll through kilometers of large overhead pipes to spot potentially hazardous residual uranium. Officials say it's safer, more accurate and tremendously faster than having workers take external measurements to identify which pipes need to be removed and decontaminated at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon. They say it could save taxpayers tens of millions of dollars on cleanups of that site and one near Paducah, Kentucky, which for decades enriched uranium for nuclear reactors and weapons. The RadPiper robot was developed at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh for the U.S. Department of Energy, which envisions using similar technology at other nuclear complexes such as the Savannah River Site in Aiken, South Carolina, and the Hanford Site in Richland, Washington. Roboticist William "Red" Whittaker, who began his career developing robots to help clean up the Three Mile Island nuclear power accident and now directs Carnegie Mellon's Field Robotics Center, said technology like RadPiper could transform key tasks in cleaning up the country's nuclear legacy.

The US Department of Justice called it "the largest foreign bribery case in history". After Brazilian multinational Odebrecht admitted guilt in a cash-for-contracts corruption scandal in 12 nations, it vowed to change its ways. But Brazil's authorities are still wrestling with an encrypted computer system used to run the firm's illicit payment system. The federal police building in Curitiba, in the southern state of Parana, has hardly been out of the news. In June 2015, the now-convicted former chief executive, Marcelo Odebrecht, was brought here. More recently, the HQ received former president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, jailed for corruption on charges related to the wider Lava Jato (Car Wash) investigation based here.

Science-fiction thrillers, like the 1980s classic film The Terminator, illuminate our imaginations, but they also stoke fears about autonomous, intelligent killer robots eradicating the human race. And while this scenario might seem far-fetched, last year, over 100 robotics and artificial intelligence technology leaders, including Elon Musk and Google's DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, issued a warning about the risks posed by super-intelligent machines. In an open letter to the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, the signatories said that once developed, killer robots -- weapons designed to operate autonomously on the battlefield -- "will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend." The letter states: "These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways. We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora's box is opened, it will be hard to close."

Are the U.S., China, and Russia recklessly undertaking an "AI arms race"? Clearly, there is military competition among these great powers to advance a range of applications of robotics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems. So far, the U.S. has been leading the way. AI and autonomy are crucial to the Pentagon's Third Offset strategy. Its Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, Project Maven, has become a "pathfinder" for this endeavor and has started to deploy algorithms in the fight against ISIS.

We have already had to wake up to fake news - will we soon have to stop trusting video and audio news too as artificial intelligence makes it easier to create convincing fakes? On Tech Tent this week we look at the advances in technology which allow you to get anybody to say anything, and explore their implications. It was a video featuring Barack Obama talking about a character from the hit movie Black Panther, and then making a crude remark about Donald Trump, which raised new concerns about this subject. It was not of course genuine - the actor Jordan Peele's voice had been synced to the lips of the former US president. The video was created by Buzzfeed using software called FakeApp, a freely available tool which has also been used to superimpose the faces of celebrities into porn videos.

Silicon Valley is going to have to work through its qualms about providing AI services to the military, said Alphabet board member and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Schmidt said that AI would be useful for "defensive and perhaps offensive purposes" in warfare, and developing the technology would have to be done with the help of the private sector. When asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) how this would work considering the "reluctance" of tech companies to work with the Department of Defense, Schmidt suggested that firms will need to agree between themselves on acceptable norms. "The industry is going to come to some set of agreements on AI principles -- what is appropriate use, what is not -- and my guess is that there will be some kind of consensus among key industry players on that," said Schmidt. Use SecureDrop or Signal to securely send messages and files to The Verge without revealing your identity.

The French Revolution was one of the most important political transformations in history. Even today, more than 200 years later, it's held up as a model of democratic nation-building. But for years, historians and political scientists have wondered just how the democratic trailblazers of the French Revolution managed to pull off the creation of an entirely new kind of governance. New research from an interdisciplinary collaboration among historians, political scientists, and statisticians suggest that rhetorical innovations may have played a significant role in winning acceptance for the new principles of governance that built the French republic's foundation -- and inspired future democracies around the world. The study, published today in PNAS, used machine learning techniques to comb through transcripts of 40,000 speeches from the deliberations of the makeshift assembly formed during the revolution's early days to hash out the laws and institutions of the new government.

Intelligence agents and military operatives may come to rely heavily on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to parse huge quantities of data, and to control a growing arsenal of autonomous systems, but the US Military wants to make sure that this doesn't lead to blindly trusting algorithms, that even though there are a couple of tests to assess how dangerous they are, or could become, are still at their heart mysterious black boxes. As a result the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of the US Defense Department that explores new technologies, is following the lead shown by Columbia University, MIT, and Nvidia, who have all been trying to develop new systems that read AI's minds and get them to explain their decision making processes, and they've announced they're going to be funding several new projects. The approaches range from adding further machine learning systems geared toward providing an explanation, to the development of new machine learning approaches that incorporate an "elucidation by design." "We now have this real explosion of AI," says David Gunning, the DARPA program manager who is funding an effort to develop AI techniques that include some explanation of their reasoning, "the reason for that is mainly machine learning, and deep learning in particular." Deep learning and other machine learning techniques have taken Silicon Valley by storm, improving voice recognition and image classification significantly, and they are being used in more contexts than ever before, including areas like law enforcement and medicine, where the consequences of a mistake may be serious.