What's happening now: Myanmar's government launched its latest surge of violence against the Rohingya last October after alleged attacks by Rohingya insurgents against government posts. A report from the United Nation's Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights calls the crackdown "systematic" and "very likely" including crimes against humanity, branding the government's work as "ethnic cleansing." The political controversy: Aung San Suu Kyi, who was imprisoned for nearly two decades after calling for democracy and human rights under the country's oppressive military junta, has refused to speak out against the violence as Myanmar's de-facto leader. Five other women who have won the Nobel Peace Prize called on Suu Kyi to acknowledge the violence in an open letter -- though the Nobel Committee remains exceedingly unlikely to revoke her prize, per the NYT.

Hackers will start to get help from robots and artificial intelligence soon. The next major cyberattack could involve artificial intelligence systems.

It's been a year since The Washington Post started using its homegrown artificial intelligence technology, Heliograf, to spit out around 300 short reports and alerts on the Rio Olympics. Since then, it's used Heliograf to cover congressional and gubernatorial races on Election Day and D.C.-area high school football games, producing stories like this one and tweets like this: Landon beat Whitman 34-0; https://t.co/V6zVPi7a9O The Associated Press has used robots to automate earnings coverage, while USA Today has used video software to create short videos. But media executives are more excited about AI's potential to go beyond rote reporting. Jeremy Gilbert, director of strategic initiatives at the Post, shared what the paper has learned so far from robo reporting and what it's still trying to figure out.

Last year, two data scientists from security firm ZeroFOX conducted an experiment to see who was better at getting Twitter users to click on malicious links, humans or an artificial intelligence. The researchers taught an AI to study the behaviour of social network users, and then design and implement its own phishing bait. In tests, the artificial hacker was substantially better than its human competitors, composing and distributing more phishing tweets than humans, and with a substantially better conversion rate. The AI, named SNAP_R, sent simulated spear-phishing tweets to over 800 users at a rate of 6.75 tweets per minute, luring 275 victims. By contrast, Forbes staff writer Thomas Fox-Brewster, who participated in the experiment, was only able to pump out 1.075 tweets a minute, making just 129 attempts and luring in just 49 users.

New technologies are opening a new era in automation for manufacturers--one in which humans and machines will increasingly work side by side. Over the past two decades, automation in manufacturing has been transforming factory floors, the nature of manufacturing employment, and the economics of many manufacturing sectors. Today, we are on the cusp of a new automation era: rapid advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are enabling machines to match or outperform humans in a range of work activities, including ones requiring cognitive capabilities. Industry executives--those whose companies have already embraced automation, those who are just getting started, and those who have not yet begun fully reckoning with the implications of this new automation age--need to consider the following three fundamental perspectives: what automation is making possible with current technology and is likely to make possible as the technology continues to evolve; what factors besides technical feasibility to consider when making decisions about automation; and how to begin thinking about where--and how much--to automate in order to best capture value from automation over the long term. To understand the scope of possible automation in the manufacturing sector as a whole, we conducted a study of manufacturing work in 46 countries in both the developed and developing worlds, covering about 80 percent of the global workforce.

I've written about not fearing AI but possessing a significant amount of concern when it comes to the people behind it. I figured I'd continue the trend and talk about the coming regulations when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and everything cognitive, intelligent, and algorithmic. I am not fully a believer in regulations being the only solution, but I know they are the solutions that big companies tend to pay attention to -- which is why they spend so much money to distort and bend regulations to what they want to see in their industries. We are entering a phase of the Internet where there are going to an increased number of calls for regulations. Whether it's privacy, security, breaches, or specifically on technology like drones, artificial intelligence, bots, and machine learning, expect more government involvement in the future.

As humans we feel nothing more viscerally -- in the most literal sense -- than our health. That makes this year's gathering of the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Interventions Society -- MICCAI 2017 -- in Quebec City, Canada, one of the best ways to understand how deep learning is improving the lives of people all around us. The conference brings together leading biomedical scientists, engineers and clinicians to talk about new technologies in medical imaging and computer-assisted intervention, providing an early look at trends poised to sweep through the $6.5 trillion healthcare industry. This will be the group's biggest conference yet, with 1,300 attendees. And deep learning -- which pairs vast quantities of data with sophisticated neural networks to give computers amazing new capabilities -- deserves a lot of the credit, organizers say.

For Russia and Vladimir Putin, it is clear that planetary domination and artificial intelligence (AI) are inextricably intertwined. "Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia but for all humankind," he said via live video feed as schools started this month. "Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world." Putin isn't an outlier in his thinking; he is simply vocalizing to match the intensity a race that China, Russia, and the US are already running, to acquire smart military power. Each nation has formally recognized the critical importance of intelligent machines to the future of their national security, and each sees AI-related technologies such as autonomous drones and intelligence processing software as tools for augmenting human soldier capital.

The creators of a new artificial intelligence programme hope it could one day save democracy. Are we ready for robots to take over politics? "Siri, who should I vote for?" It has stock, non-committal answers for anything that sounds remotely controversial. But the next generation of digital helpers, powered by advances in artificial intelligence (AI), might not be so reticent.

Afew years ago the cosmologist Max Tegmark found himself weeping outside the Science Museum in South Kensington. He'd just visited an exhibition that represented the growth in human knowledge, everything from Charles Babbage's difference engine to a replica of Apollo 11. What moved him to tears wasn't the spectacle of these iconic technologies but an epiphany they prompted. "It hit me like a brick," he recalls, "that every time we understood how something in nature worked, some aspect of ourselves, we made it obsolete. Once we understood how muscles worked we built much better muscles in the form of machines, and maybe when we understand how our brains work we'll build much better brains and become utterly obsolete." Tegmark's melancholy insight was not some idle hypothesis, but instead an intellectual challenge to himself at the dawn of the age of artificial intelligence. What will become of humanity, he was moved to ask, if we manage to create an intelligence that outstrips our own?