In the near term I see greater prosperity and reduced mortality due to things like highway accidents and medical errors, where there's a huge loss of life today.

Education Department officials opened formal negotiations on Monday to rewrite federal rules meant to protect students from fraud by colleges and universities. The talks with university representative and student advocates are taking place as the department faces criticism for delaying consideration of tens of thousands of loan forgiveness claims from students who say they were defrauded by for-profit colleges. The 1994 rule, known as borrower defense, allowed loan forgiveness if it was determined that the college had deceived them. But the rule was rarely used until the demise of Corinthian and ITT Tech for-profit chains several years ago, when thousands of students flooded the department with requests to cancel their loans. In 2016, the Obama administration passed revisions to the rule, which clarified the process and added protections for students.

Police in the US state of Delaware are poised to deploy'smart' cameras in cruisers to help authorities detect a vehicle carrying a fugitive, missing child or straying senior. The video feeds will be analyzed using artificial intelligence to identify vehicles by license plate or other features and'give an extra set of eyes' to officers on patrol, says David Hinojosa of Coban Technologies, the company providing the equipment. 'We are helping officers keep their focus on their jobs,' said Hinojosa, who touts the new technology as a'dashcam on steroids.' The program is part of a growing trend to use vision-based AI to thwart crime and improve public safety, a trend which has stirred concerns among privacy and civil liberties activists who fear the technology could lead to secret'profiling' and misuse of data. US-based startup Deep Science is using the same technology to help retail stores detect in real time if an armed robbery is in progress, by identifying guns or masked assailants.

Call of Duty: WWII brings the multibillion-dollar video game franchise full circle. While the most recent editions of Activision's series have been set in futuristic settings, this new blockbuster release ( just out, $59 and up, for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PCs, ages 17-up) plants you in a platoon fighting its way across Europe in World War II. Like the more than a dozen previous Call of Duty games, Call of Duty: WWII is a first-person shooter. So you get to line up Nazis in your gun sights on Normandy beach, within occupied France and in Germany. Playing out like the Band of Brothers miniseries, COD: WWII takes players on an action-packed history lesson through the last year of fighting in the European theater.

Inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, who currently runs a group at Google writing automatic responses to your emails in cooperation with the Gmail team, recently talked with WIRED Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Thompson at the Council on Foreign Relations. Nicholas Thompson: Let's begin with you explaining the law of accelerating returns, which is one of the fundamental ideas underpinning your writing and your work. Ray Kurzweil: Halfway through the Human Genome Project, 1 percent of the genome had been collected after seven years. So mainstream critics said, "I told you this wasn't gonna work. You're at seven years, 1 percent; it's going to take 700 years just like we said." My reaction at the time was: "Wow we finished 1 percent? Because 1 percent is only seven doublings from 100 percent. It had been doubling every year. The project was finished seven years later. That's continued since the end of the genome project--that first genome cost a billion dollars and we're now down to $1,000.

The world's first floating nation is set to appear in the Pacific Ocean off the island of Tahiti in 2020. A handful of hotels, homes, offices, restaurants and more will be built in the next few years by the nonprofit Seasteading Institute, which hopes to'liberate humanity from politicians'. The radical plans, bankrolled by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, could see the creation of an independent nation that will float in international waters and operate within its own laws. In a new interview, Joe Quirk, president of the Seasteading Institute, said he wants to see'thousands' of rogue floating cities by 2050, each of them'offering different ways of governance'. The world's first floating nation is set to appear in the Pacific Ocean off the island of Tahiti in 2020 (artist's impression).

Nasa's Juno probe has sent back stunning images of the planet during its latest flyby. One of the most breathtaking photos shows a'string of pearls' – a series of eight massive rotating storms on Jupiter. The image was taken on October 24 when Juno was 20,577 miles (33,115 kilometres) above the tops of the clouds of the planet, which travel at about 129,000 mph (60 km/s). This image was taken by Juno on October 24 and was processed and colour enhanced. The swirling lines are cyclones on the planet, while the white ovals are'pearls' - massive rotating storms.

Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business Section. One story stood out for me: Uber says it will introduce flying taxis in Los Angeles by 2020. "We're trying to work with cities in the early days who are interested in partnering to make it happen, while knowing that there will be pitfalls along the way," says Jeff Holden, Uber's chief product officer. Solar panels: President Trump will be presented with a plan Monday to impose restrictions and tariffs on imports of the most popular photovoltaic generating panels used in the booming U.S. residential and utility-scale solar markets. The U.S. International Trade Commission, an independent agency, has proposed the action after two international solar-panel producers with U.S. plants complained that they needed protection from low-cost imports.

Unfortunately, the WEF has withheld some of the tool's coolest features--including a "Dynamic Briefing" button that generates a multi-page dossier on a given subject--from the public release, although Jurgens says some of these may be available to paying users in the future.

AI experts have put together a seven-minute film that depicts a terrifying future where tiny killer drones are programmed to carry out mass killings. Made by an advocacy group called Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, the footage shows palm-sized drones armed with explosives finding and attacking people without human supervision. These tiny drones can kill with ruthless efficiency and campaigners warn a preemptive ban on the technology is needed to stop a new era of horrific mass destruction. In the film, machines can can spot activists in lecture halls and kill them by propelling an explosive into their head. The video starts with a developer introducing the new technology, saying these drones can react 100 times faster than a human. He says these drones have wide field cameras, face recognition, special sensors and shaped explosives.