In its quest to find out how young Earth evolved and life on this planet began, NASA has used Earth's gravity like a slingshot to propel a spacecraft into an orbit that will help it land on an asteroid and bring a sample back home. The maneuver, which is being referred to as a "gravity assist," happened on Friday, when the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft that launched last year passed within 11,000 miles of Earth -- a point visible to viewers on the ground through a telescope -- going 19,000 mph. During that pass, our planet's gravity bounced the spacecraft's orbital path 6 degrees, putting it in line with the 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid Bennu. During its closest point to us, OSIRIS-REx was over Antarctica, although it flew over and was visible to other areas on Friday. "A few weeks after the flyby we will assess the outgoing trajectory on its way to Bennu," Dan Wibben, an expert from company KinetX Aerospace who led the design of the gravity assist maneuver, said in a NASA statement.

Artificial Intelligence began as a philosophical conundrum in ancient times, developed into a science fiction forecast (and warning) in the Modern Era and is a practical reality today. This shows that from the earliest known period of human history to the present day it has been a subject of interest to some of the brightest minds and powerful personalities. Here's a run-down of some of the most insightful, important or accurate things which have been said: Alan Turing was a pioneer in bringing AI from the realm of philosophical prediction to reality. He realized in the 1950s it would need greater understanding of human intelligence before we could hope to build machines which would "think" like us. "I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."

One example from the 1980's is another old-time favorite. It is said that the Department of Defense was trying to analyze pictures of tanks. They wanted to be able to use the computer to distinguish US tanks from Russian tanks. Rather than programming it per se, they used lots of pictures of tanks and labeled the pictures as either showing a Russian tank or a US tank. At first, it seemed that the system was able to distinguish between the two. After more careful inspection, it turns out that the algorithm was only focusing on the aspects of how grainy the photo was.

We are surrounded by hysteria about the future of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. There is hysteria about how powerful they will become how quickly, and there is hysteria about what they will do to jobs. As I write these words on September 2nd, 2017, I note just two news stories from the last 48 hours. Yesterday, in the New York Times, Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, wrote an opinion piece titled How to Regulate Artificial Intelligence where he does a good job of arguing against the hysteria that Artificial Intelligence is an existential threat to humanity. He proposes rather sensible ways of thinking about regulations for Artificial Intelligence deployment, rather than the chicken little "the sky is falling" calls for regulation of research and knowledge that we have seen from people who really, really, should know a little better. Today, there is a story in Market Watch that robots will take half of today's jobs in 10 to 20 years. It even has a graphic to prove the numbers. How many robots are currently operational in those jobs? How many realistic demonstrations have there been of robots working in this arena? Similar stories apply to all the other job categories in this diagram where it is suggested that there will be massive disruptions of 90%, and even as much as 97%, in jobs that currently require physical presence at some particular job site. Mistaken predictions lead to fear of things that are not going to happen. Why are people making mistakes in predictions about Artificial Intelligence and robotics, so that Oren Etzioni, I, and others, need to spend time pushing back on them? Below I outline seven ways of thinking that lead to mistaken predictions about robotics and Artificial Intelligence. We find instances of these ways of thinking in many of the predictions about our AI future. I am going to first list the four such general topic areas of such predictions that I notice, along with a brief assessment of where I think they currently stand. Research on AGI is an attempt to distinguish a thinking entity from current day AI technology such as Machine Learning. Here the idea is that we will build autonomous agents that operate much like beings in the world. This has always been my own motivation for working in robotics and AI, but the recent successes of AI are not at all like this.

If you are a data scientist, a software developer, or in the social and human sciences with interest in digital humanities, then you're no stranger to the ongoing discussions on how algorithms embed biases, and discrimination and the call for critical and ethical engagement. I have keenly been following such discussion for a while and this post is an attempt to put together the articles, books, book reviews, videos, interviews, twitter threads and so on., that I've come across in one place so it can be used as a resource. This list is by no means exhaustive and as more and more awareness is being raised, there are more pieces/articles/journal papers being written on a daily basis. I plan to update these lists regularly. Also, if you think there are relevant material that I have not included, please leave them as a comment and I will add them.

Halt and Catch Fire Donna (Kerry Bishe) makes a play to land a heavy hitter, while her ex (Scoot McNairy), has a talk with one of their daughters about a troubling issue at school. Oprah's Master Class In the first of two new episodes, Usher describes how he dealt with fame at a young age and the role that family has played in shaping his career and life. Then soul singer Gladys Knight reflects on her coming of age in the music business, and the reality of touring in the segregated South of the 1950s. By a coincidence in programming all five movies in the action franchise are airing on three channels, but not in order. Up first is the fourth film, "The Bourne Legacy" (2012), starring Jeremy Renner and Rachel Weisz. 3 p.m. FX.

China's top security officer has revealed plans to use artificial intelligence to predict crime, terrorism and social unrest before it happens. Meng Jianzhu, the head of the Chinese Community Party's central commission for political and legal affairs, said the government would start to use AI software which uses machine learning, data mining and computer modelling to predict where crime and disorder is likely to occur. "Artificial intelligence can complete tasks with a precision and speed unmatchable by humans, and will drastically improve the predictability, accuracy and efficiency of social management," Mr Meng told colleagues at a meeting in Beijing on Friday. He said security forces should look for patterns in data about terror attacks and build an analysis model to help authorities predict where the attack may strike, Chinese news website thepaper.cn Mr Meng also called for all elements of the Chinese state and the party to share data with each other and for renewed efforts to integrate surveillance footage systems across the country.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. I would venture to guess that most people had their first encounter with natural language processing (NLP) when Apple added Siri to the iPhone. Starting with the iPhone 4S, you could ask "her" simple questions such as "Who was the 12th president of the United States?" (Zachary Taylor) and "Will you marry me?" (We hardly know one another). Personally, I use Siri on a near daily basis for getting me to where I need to go and finding the best Indian, Thai, or Mediterranean restaurant once I arrive there.

Robotic ships are the stuff of science fiction and the United States Navy. In 2016, the Navy christened Sea Hunter, a 132-foot-long, fully autonomous vessel designed to patrol the ocean and look for submarines lurking beneath the surface. Sea Hunter is the culmination of a six-year-long project by DARPA and the Office of Naval Research to make a ship that can do a job all on its own, reporting back to human controllers without any onboard crew. If Sea Hunter was the proof of concept, Rolls-Royce wants to transform unmanned ships from a single novelty into a major part of navies around the world. Rolls-Royce (not the car company) released a concept for an autonomous naval vessel last week, one that would be powered by Rolls-Royce engines and controlled by its own systems.

NASA's asteroid-chasing spacecraft is swinging by Earth today on its way to a space rock. Launched a year ago, Osiris-Rex was on track to pass within about 11,000 miles (17,700 kilometers) of the home planet Friday afternoon - above Antarctica. Those with telescopes were advised to eyes set on the sky at 5.52 pm BST (12.52pm ET) in order to have a chance of seeing the vessel before it departs. It needs Earth's gravity as a slingshot to put it on a path toward the asteroid Bennu.