Humans must prioritise the colonisation of Mars so the species can be conserved in the event of a third world war, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk said on Sunday. "It's important to get a self-sustaining base on Mars because it's far enough away from earth that [in the event of a war] it's more likely to survive than a moon base," Musk said on stage at SXSW – just days after Donald Trump announced plans to meet the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, in an attempt to defuse rising nuclear tension. "If there's a third world war we want to make sure there's enough of a seed of human civilisation somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages," Musk said, responding to questions from his friend Jonah Nolan, co-creator of TV show Westworld. SpaceX is working on a vehicle that will take humans to Mars, a 100-metre ship codenamed the BFR (Big Fucking Rocket). But building a colony would require "tremendous entrepreneurial resources", Musk said. He also countered the suggestion that Mars might be "some escape hatch for rich people" by highlighting the risks of the mission: "It will be like Shackleton's ad for Antarctic explorers: 'Difficult, dangerous, a good chance you'll die, excitement for those who survive.' "There's not many people who will want to go in the beginning," he said, adding that over time the Red Planet colony would be hospitable and have "great bars.

The Army has eliminated the need to do lengthy pre-flight checks for its unmanned aerial vehicles by applying artificial intelligence algorithms on top of existing software programs. "They call it an unmanned vehicle because there's no pilot sitting up in it, but the pilot it is sitting up in a box in the desert doing the pre-flight checks and doing all the flight controls," said Walter O'Brien, CEO of Scorpion Computer Services. "We've now automated that person where you just hit a button to do that kind of stuff."

AI could reboot industries and make the economy more productive; it's already infusing many of the products we use daily. But a new report by more than 20 researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, OpenAI, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation warns that the same technology creates new opportunities for criminals, political operatives, and oppressive governments--so much so that some AI research may need to be kept secret. Included in the report, The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation, are four dystopian vignettes involving artificial intelligence that seem taken straight out of the Netflix science fiction show Black Mirror. An administrator for a building's robot security system spends some of her time on Facebook during the workday. There she sees an ad for a model train set and downloads a brochure for it.

Twice: Since being launched in September of 2011, China's Tiangong-1 space station has only hosted a pair of crewed missions. There won't be a third because that big ole' hunk of space metal will come crashing down into the Earth's atmosphere sometime between now and the middle of April. "Months": That's how long the Trump administration has reportedly been working on plans to allow federal agencies to track and shoot down civilian drones. And like most of the policies set forth by this administration, the drone ruling could be implemented tomorrow, next week, four months from now or not at all, depending exclusively on the whims of the President. Because that's how good governance is supposed to work.

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The world is full of connected devices–and more are coming. In 2017, there were an estimated 8.4 billion internet-enabled thermostats, cameras, streetlights and other electronics. By 2020 that number could exceed 20 billion, and by 2030 there could be 500 billion or more. Because they'll all be online all the time, each of those devices–whether a voice-recognition personal assistant or a pay-by-phone parking meter or a temperature sensor deep in an industrial robot–will be vulnerable to a cyberattack and could even be part of one.

Clocks move forward this weekend, which can only mean it's time for the East Coast to struggle under feet of snow once again. Well, that or it's time for Barack and Michelle Obama to team up with Netflix to produce shows to guide humanity into the future. While the world keeps turning, however, let's answer this one very important question: What was the rest of the internet up to last week? What Happened: In a move that surely delighted everyone who'd ever wanted to ignore all legal advice and do something stupid, one witness in the ongoing investigation into potential Russian interference in the 2016 election decided to do a media tour after receiving a subpoena for evidence. What Really Happened: Before last week, it's probably fair to say that most people hadn't heard of Sam Nunberg.

China's science and technology minister said on Saturday that the government had made an open-source platform to boost the development of artificial intelligence (AI), as part of a plan to make China a world-leader in this field by 2030. He said that offering AI on open-source platforms would help with its scientific development and help it rapidly expand, allowing the creation of a new generation of AI. "Open-source platforms are needed because AI can play a bigger role in development and make it easier for entrepreneurs to have access to resources," Wan Gang said in a press conference to mark a session of the National People's Assembly. The minister said that the technology had been an area of development in China since 1980, and now the country wanted to lead the sector through the national plan – started by President Xi Jinping – which involves multiple ministries in order to apply the technology in all fields. He also highlighted the achievements made in the area in the last few years, such as the development of intelligent vehicles, facial recognition at airports and train stations or some companies developing robots that improve people's' quality of life. Wan said promotion of scientific research and development has been a key Chinese policy, with increased state investment and incentives.

On Tuesday, a privacy and security report published by Gizmodo revealed that Google and the Pentagon are collaborating on developing drones. Known as Project Maven, the Department of Defense pilot project involves analyzing, combing through, defining, and categorizing visual data amassed by aerial drones. It wouldn't be too far off to say the project would function as the Pentagon's all-seeing eye. According to Greg Allen, a Center for a New American Society adjunct fellow, the current amount of obtained footage is so vast it isn't possible for human analysts at the defense agency to sift through it and correctly define objects in the footage. As it stands, the United States' drone strike program is already criticized by human rights groups like Reprieve for reportedly killing hundreds of civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and beyond in spite of claims of "surgical" precision from former CIA director John Brennan in 2011.

A program called Project Maven is utilising the technology to automate the analysis of objects in the enormous amount of images that are captured by the Department of Defence's surveillance drones - also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Gizmodo reported that some Google employees were "outraged that the company would offer resources to the military for surveillance technology involved in drone operations". There have been almost 30,000 coalition strikes against targets in Iraq and Syria since the US-led intervention in 2014, the intelligence behind many of which is developed by analysis of UAV surveillance footage. Google confirmed that software called TensorFlow was being used by the Pentagon for a pilot and said it had "long worked with government agencies to provide technology solutions". A Google spokesperson said: "The technology flags images for human review, and is for non-offensive uses only.

'Virtual reality' and'cognitive computing' have become the trends to watch in the tech industry in recent years. In many ways, the excitement makes sense. The world around us continues to converge and become infinitely more connected, driven largely by the ability for businesses to sort, analyze, and action on the vast amounts of data that are being generated everyday. This, paired with a new generation of inexpensive VR headsets have sparked a flurry of renewed interest for gamers, just as'thinking' computers like IBM's Watson have literally stolen the show while schooling human opponents on Jeopardy. However, thanks to a recent slate of research by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), these two technologies are poised to help us travel far beyond the bounds of Earth.