It is hard to imagine a more scathing indictment of our ability to read another's thoughts and intentions than our inability to predict Donald Trump's next move. From the gross pre-election misjudgments to postelection bafflement, the best pundits are at a loss to accurately anticipate his response to matters like North Korean military aggressiveness or his moment-by-moment political gyrations and opinion reversals. Labeling Trump a narcissist, psychopath, megalomaniac or attention-impaired, or all of the above, might feel explanatory, but even when armed with the best psychoanalytic insights, we have no idea what he will do when presented with a new or unforeseen circumstance. If conventional psychology isn't up to the task, perhaps we should step back and consider a tantalizing sci-fi alternative -- that Trump doesn't operate within conventional human cognitive constraints, but rather is a new life form, a rudimentary artificial intelligence-based learning machine. When we strip away all moral, ethical and ideological considerations from his decisions and see them strictly in the light of machine learning, his behavior makes perfect sense. Consider how deep learning occurs in neural networks such as Google's Deep Mind or IBM's Deep Blue and Watson.

An American military drone strike over the weekend in southern Libya killed a top recruiter and logistics specialist for Al Qaeda's branch in northwest Africa, the Pentagon said on Wednesday, and a senior military official warned of more attacks on extremists there. The military's Africa Command said in a statement that the attack killed two militants, one of whom was identified as Musa Abu Dawud, a high-ranking official in Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, known as AQIM. Mr. Dawud trained Qaeda recruits in Libya for strike operations in the region, and provided logistics, money and weapons that enabled the group to threaten and attack American and Western interests, the military statement said. Until now, the Pentagon had focused its counterterrorism strikes in Libya -- eight since President Trump took office -- almost exclusively on Islamic State fighters and operatives farther north. Over several months in 2016, the military conducted nearly 500 airstrikes in the coastal city of Surt to destroy the Islamic State's stronghold there.

France's Emmanuel Macron knows his country is not about to develop a local equivalent of Google or Facebook to power the development of artificial intelligence. But in a national AI strategy to be unveiled this week, the French president will argue that France has other assets to fuel innovation: its foreign brain trust, huge troves of state-owned data and links to European research institutes to share and leverage knowledge, according to French officials. Macron's aim is nothing less than to drag his country into the age of AI and erase 30 years of underperformance on innovation. "We missed all the big technological revolutions of recent years, but France has a card to play in the field of artificial intelligence," said an aide to the president who asked not to be named. "Either we seize the chance now, or we watch another wave pass us by."

Plans for smart houses in the future are slowly becoming more and more plausible. A house that does all the manual labor for the occupants, where dinner is ready on the kitchen table and all the amenities in a house are included in these plans. Thanks to Baylor University's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and deep learning research, a future with smart houses is getting closer. Listed among the research opportunities in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering is deep learning. This research is helping Artificial Intelligence (AI) to develop into what is presented in science fiction novels and television shows.

In these notes we describe heuristics to predict computational-to-statistical gaps in certain statistical problems. These are regimes in which the underlying statistical problem is information-theoretically possible although no efficient algorithm exists, rendering the problem essentially unsolvable for large instances. The methods we describe here are based on mature, albeit non-rigorous, tools from statistical physics. These notes are based on a lecture series given by the authors at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York City, on May 16th, 2017.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. This week we're excited to share our latest installment of Future Tense Fiction, "Domestic Violence," a story by futurist and science-fiction writer Madeline Ashby. The story raises questions about the relationship between abuse and technology, something that you can learn more about in a response to the story by the National Network to End Domestic Violence's Ian Harris. The ways our technology use can be weaponized against our best interests continued to dominate the news this week. April Glaser explains what might come of the new Federal Trade Commission investigation into Facebook's privacy practices in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica debacle.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey's staff worked with ridesharing company Uber to launch the company's experimental autonomous vehicle program without informing the public, emails obtained by the Guardian revealed. The conversations between Ashwini Chhabra, the head of policy development at Uber, and Ducey's deputy chief of staff Danny Seiden show that the state willingly accommodated Uber's self-driving cars -- a considerable departure from the government's harsh words for the company following a fatal accident involving one of the vehicles. Emails reveal Uber and Arizona governor Doug Ducey hid autonomous vehicle program from public. According to the emails published by the Guardian, Chhabra contacted Seiden on Aug. 19, 2016, to alert him that Uber would begin "testing some self-driving functionality" starting that weekend. "There will be safety drivers at the wheel, so won't look much different from what's already been on the road but wanted to flag it for you nonetheless," Chhabra promised.

PARIS (Reuters) - South Korean electronics giant Samsung will make France its third global research and development hub in artificial intelligence after Korea and the United States and hire about one hundred experts in Paris, the French president's office said on Wednesday.

Disclaimer: These are my own personal views. I do not speak for my employer. If you quote this article, please have the honesty to present these ideas as what they are: personal, speculative opinions, to be judged on their own merits. If you were around in the 1980s and 1990s, you may remember the now-extinct phenomenon of "computerphobia". I have personally witnessed it a few times as late as the early 2000s -- as personal computers were introduced into our lives, in our workplaces and homes, quite a few people would react with anxiety, fear, or even aggressivity. While some of us were fascinated by computers and awestruck by the potential they could glimpse in them, most people didn't understand them. They felt alien, abstruse, and in many ways, threatening.

What's cooler than Amazon's Alexa voice assistant being able to get you a beer? Having it delivered via a toy tank. Software developer Balázs Simon posted his newest project, called WalaBeer Tank, to Hackster earlier this week and you'll just have to see the results to believe it: The tank, a remote control toy, is rigged to deliver beer on command – complete with a crane system that makes it look like your beer is about to be launched like a ballistic missile. And in what may be our favorite use of a voice assistant so far, it can be controlled entirely using Alexa. One of the'selling points' of the tank is its follow me mode.