Mark Carney knows how to illustrate economic trends through the use of creative language. And when he talks, people tend to listen. "The massacre of the Dilberts" was how the governor of the Bank of England encapsulated the fear that middle-management jobs would be wiped out by automation – for people unfamiliar with American cartoon strips, Dilbert is a white collar office worker and the strip mocks the absurdities of office life. In his native Canada this week, Carney made a number of points in a speech on automation. Most obviously, many office jobs done by people would be done by computers, a process that was already well advanced. "When I look back 30 years ago, what I used to do in the City of London when I worked at an investment bank, probably about three-quarters of what I did is now done by machine," he said.

Cybersecurity will become a war between machines. Artificial intelligence changes the rules of computer science and automates tasks that were previously manual for both attackers and their victims. In particular, artificial intelligence is a real global security challenge. It reduces the costs of existing attacks, allows attacks previously unknown and makes it more difficult to understand who the attacker is. AI is an instrument, and as such, it has a dual nature -- good or bad -- depending on how it is used. Surveillance instruments can be used to capture terrorists or to harass ordinary citizens.

It was the week of Zuck. As Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg slogged through more than 10 hours of testimony in front of two different Congressional committees, privacy and security advocates were listening for anything they could glean about how Facebook manages data, implements privacy protections, and helps users make informed choices--or doesn't. Neither session delved as deeply as it could have into specific information about Russian goals and strategies in conducting information operations on Facebook during the 2016 US elections. And Facebook admitted this week that the data consulting firm Cambridge Analytica could have accessed private Facebook messages, on top of everything else, for the 87 million users that were in its reach. Here's how to check if you were one of the users caught in Cambridge Analytica's dragnet.

According to a new report from The New York Times, Apple has hired Google's chief of search and artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea. Tim Cook made the announcement in an email to employees, noting that Giannandrea will officially be the head of "machine learning and A.I. strategy." Giannandrea will report directly to Tim Cook. He originally joined Google after the company acquired a startup called Metaweb, where he served as chief technology officer. Google acquired Metaweb in 2010.

The US Food and Drug Administration approved this week the first software powered by artificial intelligence that replaces the need for a specialized doctor to interpret medical imagery. The software is called IDx-DR, made by diagnostic AI startup IDx, and specifically analyzes images of the retina to detect whether a person with diabetes has a complication from the disease called diabetic retinopathy. "IDx-DR is the first device authorized for marketing that provides a screening decision without the need for a clinician to also interpret the image or results, which makes it usable by health care providers who may not normally be involved in eye care," the FDA wrote in a press release. Diabetic retinopathy is a complication of diabetes where blood sugar damages the back of the eye, according to the FDA, and is the main cause of the loss of vision for those with diabetes. To use the software, a doctor takes a retinal image with a specific model of camera and uploads it to IDx-DR's cloud service.

The technologies of the defense industry are in the early stages of a seismic shift: artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are changing defense now and will enable intelligent warfare in the decades to come. These technologies will have a correspondingly tectonic effect on defense contractors. In the near term, incorporating AI into the design of traditional battle networks will vastly improve performance of current platforms and forces. Prime contractors will maintain an advantage during this phase. However, as the capabilities of AI and robotics reach an inflection point, the US Department of Defense (DoD) will shift to smaller AI- and robotics-based systems--and will rely on nontraditional players to provide them.

Over the past decade there has been much written on lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) commonly known as "killer robots". This includes legal, ethical and moral concerns as well as issues related to responsibility. And yet, for all of the discussion directed to concerns about what happens when something goes wrong, there is less attention paid as to how it will go wrong. The main difference between LAWS and our current weapons systems is the freedom they will have to make decisions on the battlefield, creating unique challenges for how we regulate such weapons. Not only is it potentially more difficult to verify the reliable behavior of LAWS, but the consequences of an accident could potentially be more severe.

IMAGE: Fang Ren, who developed algorithms to analyze data on the fly while a postdoctoral scholar at SLAC, at a Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource beamline where the system has been put... view more Blend two or three metals together and you get an alloy that usually looks and acts like a metal, with its atoms arranged in rigid geometric patterns. But once in a while, under just the right conditions, you get something entirely new: a futuristic alloy called metallic glass that's amorphous, with its atoms arranged every which way, much like the atoms of the glass in a window. Its glassy nature makes it stronger and lighter than today's best steel, plus it stands up better to corrosion and wear. Even though metallic glass shows a lot of promise as a protective coating and alternative to steel, only a few thousand of the millions of possible combinations of ingredients have been evaluated over the past 50 years, and only a handful developed to the point that they may become useful. Now a group led by scientists at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Northwestern University has reported a shortcut for discovering and improving metallic glass -- and, by extension, other elusive materials -- at a fraction of the time and cost.

From advanced robotics in R&D labs to computer vision in warehouses, technology is making an impact on every step of the manufacturing process. Lights-out manufacturing refers to factories that operate autonomously and require no human presence. These robot-run settings often don't even require lighting, and can consist of several machines functioning in the dark. While this may sound futuristic, these types of factories have been a reality for more than 15 years. Famously, the Japanese robotics maker FANUC has been operating a "lights-out" factory since 2001, where robots are building other robots completely unsupervised for nearly a month at a time. "Not only is it lights-out," said FANUC VP Gary Zywiol, "we turn off the air conditioning and heat too." To imagine a world where robots do all the physical work, one simply needs to look at the most ambitious and technology-laden factories of today. For example, the Dongguan City, China-based phone part maker Changying Precision Technology Company has created an unmanned factory. Everything in the factory -- from machining equipment to unmanned transport trucks to warehouse equipment -- is operated by computer-controlled robots. The technical staff monitors activity of these machines through a central control system. Where it once required about 650 workers to keep the factory running, robot arms have cut Changying's human workforce to less than a tenth of that, down to just 60 workers. A general manager for the company said that it aims to reduce that number to 20 in the future. As industrial technology grows increasingly pervasive, this wave of automation and digitization is being labelled "Industry 4.0," as in the fourth industrial revolution. So, what does the future of factories hold? Manufacturers predict overall efficiency to grow annually over the next five years at 7x the rate of growth seen since 1990.

John Giordani is a Cybersecurity expert. In an article in Forbes today, he describes cybersecurity as a war between machines, and it makes perfect sense. AI has changed the rules of computer science, automating what at one time was manual actions by both the attackers and their victims. This is because AI is an instrument, and while it was made by humans, it is morally agnostic. So it can be either good or bad - depending on how it is used.