New players are rapidly gaining higher market share by attracting customers with digital products and innovative services, many of which are made possible through machine learning and artificial intelligence. Such players can easily meet customer demand as they already have lean and agile digital operations. To maintain leadership, incumbents must keep pace with the new normal of rapid disruption. With its capacity to learn from large datasets and establish patterns and correlations, machine learnings can revolutionize operations. It can inject new efficiencies into tasks such as risk assessment, fraud detection, anti-money laundering, trading, and customer service by providing instant insights, relevant recommendations, and informed decisions in real-time.

No one said it would be easy. As automakers, developers, and tech companies pump funds into self-driving, electric, and yes, flying cars, there were bound to be some mistakes along the way. This week, we got a look at a few. A few hours into its first day on the job, a Las Vegas autonomous shuttle got in a fender-bender with a (human-driven) truck. Electric vehicles are facing down a threat in the shape of the Republican tax plan, which could do away with federal subsidies--not quite an industry-buster, but grim news for the burgeoning American EV sector.

They are, it seems safe to say, just about everywhere--roaming the streets of San Francisco, New York City, Phoenix, Boston, Singapore, Paris, London, Munich, and Beijing. And as Waymo (Google's self-driving car project) launches the world's first fleet of truly driverless cars in Arizona, nearly every automaker, all serious tech companies, and a flock of startups are rushing to colonize an industry that has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives--and generate trillions of dollars. What retains its shock value is how quickly we've gotten here. Ten years ago, there was no reason to think the idea of being whisked about town by a collection of zeroes and ones while you napped or texted or watched TV was anything but the province of science fiction. Namely, the folks watching a group of robots roam an abandoned Air Force base outside Los Angeles, moving through intersections, merging into traffic, finding their own parking spaces, and more.

What negative impact could AI have? It's clear that AI – like any technology – could be used for corrupt means. Adversarial AI (where inputs can be carefully crafted to trick AI systems into misclassifying data) has already been demonstrated. It could, for example, make an AI vision system that recognises a red traffic light, perceive a green one instead – which could have disastrous ramifications for an autonomous vehicle.

The strike was carried out Thursday afternoon in the Bay Region, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of the capital, Mogadishu, according to a statement by the U.S. Africa Command. A spokeswoman told The Associated Press that no civilians were anywhere near the strike.

YANGON, Myanmar – Two foreign journalists accused of illegally flying a drone over parliament buildings in Myanmar have appeared in court for the first time since their arrest last month. The two Malaysians appeared during a hearing in the capital, Naypyitaw, along with their local interpreter and driver. The four men working for Turkish Radio and Television were charged under the Export and Import Law and face up to three years in prison if found guilty. The four were detained on Oct. 27.

MOGADISHU, Somalia – A U.S. drone strike killed "several militants" with al-Shabab in Somalia, the military said, as the Trump administration increasingly targets what has become the deadliest Islamic extremist group in Africa. The strike was carried out Thursday afternoon in the Bay Region, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of the capital, Mogadishu, according to a statement by the U.S. Africa Command. A spokeswoman told The Associated Press that no civilians were anywhere near the strike. The U.S. military says it has carried out 22 airstrikes this year against the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab and the smaller Islamic State group presence in Somalia after the Trump administration approved expanded military efforts. The U.S. says the latest airstrike, like others, occurred in cooperation with Somalia's government.

China this week announced an AI-powered unmanned police station will open in one of its capitol cities, proving once again that no other country quite embraces artificial intelligence like it does. The station appears to be designed with driver and vehicle related matters in mind, making it more like a Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) than a cop shop. It will provide driver's examinations via simulator, registration services, and feature advanced face-scanning technology developed by Tencent, according to a report from Chinese financial paper Caijing Neican. Setting aside the myriad of law enforcement related implications, there's still plenty to unpack concerning the idea of unmanned government buildings. This station will be open to the public 24/7, and since citizens will presumably be dealing with dedicated hardware there should be far less points of failure than web-based solutions tend to have.

Just weeks after the publication of the UK government's review of the country's capabilities in artificial intelligence, Southampton Professor Dame Wendy Hall, co-chair of the review, says the time is right to capitalise while the time is right. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around for a long time as a concept but in reality, we're now seeing a major surge in the technological development of AI which is likely to see automation continue to escalate and accelerate. The machines we're building today are so much more powerful than ever before in terms of their processing power and storage ability, and because of the huge amounts of data available, we've vastly improved our capacity to build intelligent systems that can learn and begin to'think' for themselves, although it's still an open question as to whether they will ever really be able to outperform the human brain. But we now need to act in order to realise the full potential of AI and achieve the positive benefits it can deliver. Through our review, we made 18 specific recommendations including a number that focus on ways in which universities, research institutes, industry and government can come together to better prepare us for the AI landscape of the future.

The FCC granted Alphabet's Project Loon, which delivers internet via balloons, an experimental license last month to help get Puerto Ricans online after Hurricane Maria decimated the island's infrastructure. While the team cautiously tweeted that it would'explore of it was possible to help,' Project Loon announced today that it has worked with AT&T and T-Mobile to successfully deliver basic internet to over 100,000 Puerto Ricans to the internet. Since turning on service, #ProjectLoon has delivered basic internet connectivity to more than 100K people in Puerto Rico. It's not a total success, which isn't to be expected after Puerto Ricans' communications infrastructure suffered so much damage. But the team was able to work with AT&T and T-Mobile to get "communication and internet activities like sending text messages and accessing information online for some people with LTE enabled phones," head of Project Loon Alastair Westgarth wrote in a blog post.