WASHINGTON – CNN received a waiver allowing routine drone flights above crowds, a milestone for the industry seeking greater use of the remote-controlled devices for everything from insurance inspections to covering news. The approval is the first time the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has granted a waiver for unlimited flights over people, the news network said in an emailed statement. The standards used in the application can be applied to other applicants, potentially opening vast new uses by the media and other industries for so-called unmanned aerial systems, or UAS. "This waiver signifies a critical step forward not only for CNN's UAS operations, but also the commercial UAS industry at large," said David Vigilante, senior vice president of legal affairs for CNN. The FAA currently prohibits drone flights overhead, although its regulations allow for waivers if applicants can show there's no risk of injury.

You may have heard that algorithms will take over the world. But how are they operating right now? We take a look in our series on Algorithms at Work. Machine learning algorithms work blindly towards the mathematical objective set by their designers. It is vital that this task include the need to behave ethically.

Paul unlocked the box containing the tape recording that controlled them all. The tape was a small loop that fed continuously between magnetic pickups. On it were recorded the movements of a master machinist turning out a shaft for a fractional horsepower motor. He'd been in on the making of the tape, the master from which this one had been made. He had been sent to one of the machine shops to make the recording. The foreman had pointed out the best man – what was his name? That had been the machinist's name – Rudy Hertz, an old timer, who had been about ready to retire.

American police have certainly used drones before, but not on this scale. The Los Angeles Police Commission has voted in favor of letting the LAPD fly drones in a year-long pilot program, making it the largest US police department to ever rely on the robotic aircraft. The force will use the drones for aerial searches, recon in tense situations (think: standoffs) and other tasks where officers would otherwise be at risk. The machines could save lives, according to the LAPD, but there were numerous concessions made to address privacy concerns -- and some people still aren't convinced these limits will prevent abuse. The trial's rules restrict flights to SWAT team members in dangerous situations, such as when there's a heavily armed suspect on the loose.

The right to due process was inscribed into the US constitution with a pen. A new report from leading researchers in artificial intelligence cautions it is now being undermined by computer code. Public agencies responsible for areas such as criminal justice, health, and welfare increasingly use scoring systems and software to steer or make decisions on life-changing events like granting bail, sentencing, enforcement, and prioritizing services. The report from AI Now, a research institute at NYU that studies the social implications of artificial intelligence, says too many of those systems are opaque to the citizens they hold power over. The AI Now report calls for agencies to refrain from what it calls "black box" systems opaque to outside scrutiny. Kate Crawford, a researcher at Microsoft and cofounder of AI Now, says citizens should be able to know how systems making decisions about them operate and have been tested or validated.

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), is a division of the American Defense Department that investigates new technologies. It has for some time regarded the current generation of AI technologies as important in the future. It has been in the forefront of AI research in image recognition, speech recognition and generation, robotics, autonomous vehicles, medical diagnostic systems, and more. However, DARPA is well aware that despite the high level of problem-solving capabilities of AI programs – they lack explainability. AI deep learning algorithms use complex mathematics that is very difficult for human users to understand or comprehend.

After six years in space, China's first orbital station, the Tiangong-1 (aka the "Heavenly Palace") has finally outlived its operational limits and begun its descent back to Earth. It's expected to re-enter the atmosphere in a few months, whereupon a majority of the 9.3-ton station should burn up before reaching the surface. This is how defunct satellites are supposed to be disposed of. Unfortunately, until very recently, that hasn't often been the case. For the past 50 years, we've been filling Low Earth Orbit with defunct satellites, launch vehicle upper stages, and various bits of broken spacecraft (including frozen water, coolant and paint flecks).

Though it probably doesn't feel this way to those who spend their lives running between meetings, dealing with customers, or negotiating with suppliers, the UK isn't working hard enough. UK productivity--how much all of us produce over a year divided by how many hours we spend doing it--lags France, Germany, and the U.S. by up to 30%, according to the Office of National Statistics. And it's not just the G7's most productive three countries that outperform the UK. Irish, Spanish, Belgian, and Dutch workers all significantly outperform their UK counterparts. We should be freeing people to focus on adding value, not restricting them to transactional tasks that are better and more quickly performed by automation.

In the high-stakes contest to land Amazon's new headquarters, many consider Boston to be a serious contender competing against other big technology hubs around the United States and Canada. But it's also competing against its neighbors: Several smaller Massachusetts cities -- along with Rhode Island and southern New Hampshire -- are each submitting their own pitches to Amazon, using proximity to Boston's tech talent as a major draw. "Talent really is the unquestionable, huge priority," said Brian Dacey, president of the Cambridge Innovation Center and a former Boston economic development director who says the region could make a strong case for luring the Seattle e-commerce company. Local research strengths -- such as in artificial intelligence and robotics -- are important to Amazon's business model, he said. The Seattle company is promising $5 billion of investment and 50,000 jobs in whichever North American region it chooses to build a second headquarters.

While football fans and labor experts ponder whether Colin Kaepernick found a smoking gun to bolster his collusion case against the National Football League, the still-unemployed quarterback is pointing to a central figure in the case: President Trump. Trump, according to the text of Kaepernick's grievance complaint, "has been an organizing force" in the joint decision by the league's 32 owners to deny the quarterback even a tryout. "Owners have described the Trump administration as causing paradigm shifts in their views toward NFL players." The complaint was originally made public by ABC News. Kaepernick may have a point, since Trump injected himself personally into the case and openly denigrated NFL players who supported Kaepernick.