It has become a cliche to declare that the future is full of both "great promise and great peril." Nonetheless, this aphorism expresses an important fact about the Janus-faced nature of our increasingly powerful technologies. If humanity realizes the best possible future, we could quite possibly usher in an era of unprecedented human flourishing, happiness, and value. But if the great experiment of civilization fails, our species could meet the same fate as the dinosaurs. I find it helpful to think about what a child born today could plausibly expect to witness in her or his lifetime.

Curating labeled training data has become the primary bottleneck in machine learning. Recent frameworks address this bottleneck with generative models to synthesize labels at scale from weak supervision sources. The generative model's dependency structure directly affects the quality of the estimated labels, but selecting a structure automatically without any labeled data is a distinct challenge. We propose a structure estimation method that maximizes the $\ell_1$-regularized marginal pseudolikelihood of the observed data. Our analysis shows that the amount of unlabeled data required to identify the true structure scales sublinearly in the number of possible dependencies for a broad class of models. Simulations show that our method is 100$\times$ faster than a maximum likelihood approach and selects $1/4$ as many extraneous dependencies. We also show that our method provides an average of 1.5 F1 points of improvement over existing, user-developed information extraction applications on real-world data such as PubMed journal abstracts.

The United Nations' aviation agency, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), plans to support a single worldwide drone registry. This singular ledger would be easier for law enforcement to sift through than each country's individual UAV ledger. That might irk US hobbyists, who fought and defeated the FAA in court when it passed a law to force drone owners to sign up for an American registry. The contentious case ended in a decision that classified non-commercial drones as model aircraft, which don't need to be nationally registered. Whether the US drone community cooperates with ICAO's registry is another question.

The Justice Department is investigating whether Uber illegally used software to track drivers for Lyft, its main ride-hailing competitor, to gain an advantage in attracting and recruiting drivers, according to two people familiar with the probe. The FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in New York's Southern District want to know if use of the software, which created fake customer accounts, broke any federal laws, said the people, who didn't want to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly. An Uber spokeswoman said Friday it is cooperating in the probe and that use of the software has been discontinued. The U.S. attorney's office would not comment on the case. The investigation adds to mounting legal problems for Uber, including allegations of corporate espionage involving autonomous vehicle technology and at least one other federal investigation into use of software to thwart local government efforts to monitor its operations.

A radical drone that can fly without the help of humans has revealed over $32 million in funding from backers including Microsoft is one step closer to hitting the skies of Israel. Optimus can fly for half an hour without a human pilot on the controls. Its creator, Airobotics, recently became the first in the world to be granted permission to fly an automated drone, and says the new funds will meet growing demand in the mining and homeland security industries and go towards investing in its business development efforts and expansion across industrial facilities. Israel's Airobotics, a maker of automated industrial drones, said on it has raised $32.5 million in a private funding round led by BlueRun Ventures China, Microsoft Ventures and OurCrowd.com. It also received funding from existing investors including, CRV, BRV, Waze CEO Noam Bardin, Richard Wooldridge, and David Roux, the co-founder and former chairman of Silver Lake Partners.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is probing to see if Uber Technologies Inc had used software to illegally interfere with its competitors, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The investigation is focusing on an Uber program, internally known as'Hell,' that could track drivers working for rival service Lyft Inc, the WSJ said, citing people familiar with the investigation. Under the program, which was discontinued last year, Uber created fake Lyft customer accounts to seek rides, allowing it to track nearby Lyft drivers and ride prices, the Journal said. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is probing to see if Uber Technologies Inc had used software to illegally interfere with its competitors, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Uber used top secret software called'Hell' to track drivers working for its biggest US competitor Lyft.

An abysmal government response to Hurricane Harvey exposed inadequate planning, lack of resources and confusing attempts at invoking incident command that iced potential responders such as commercial drone operators. Rescue efforts defaulted to heroic, overwhelmed local crews bolstered by the truly remarkable "Cajun Navy". In substantial form, social media played a key role for those attempting to contact responders. This show describes the nuances of the Hurricane Harvey landfall and offers precise protocols to improve future responses to natural disasters. The decision to not evacuate Houston was correct and will be the standard decision moving forward for sentinel events.

Artificial Intelligence has been the talk of the town ever since Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla's Elon Musk exchanged a war of words over its potential. Other than that several world leaders have expressed their concern over the capabilities of an AI system in the near future. Meanwhile, on September 4, Musk tweeted that countries which grow their superiority in Artificial Intelligence will rule the world and the competition might lead to World War III. He said that Russia, China and more countries are the biggest contenders. This statement came after Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking to school children, said, "Whoever becomes the leader in this area will rule the world." As a response, Musk tweeted, "It Begins…" Not only then, there have been other famous personalities who have expressed their opinions and concerns on the subject.

As the integration of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Big Data in the workplace is becoming the new norm, concerns are increasing over how the technology could affect employee performance, job security and the adaptation and reliance of technology in the legal industry. Raj Goyle, former Kansas State Representative, Harvard Law graduate and Co-Founder/CEO of LawTech platform Bodhala, sat down with Inside Counsel to discuss why AI, Machine Learning and Big Data are not costing jobs when correctly implemented, how technology eliminating inefficiencies within the workplace, and why is legal one of the last spaces to embrace tech integration.

Mary "Missy" Cummings, Director of the Humans and Autonomy Lab (HAL) at Duke University, and co-chair of the Global Future Council on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, says the technology will work best in collaboration with humans. While cab drivers may fear for their jobs, she envisages a worldwide shortage of roboticists in 2030. Artificial intelligence and robotics are showing up in every part of life, anywhere from driving, to the cellphones we use, how our data is managed in the world, how our homes are going to be built in the future. So given its ubiquity, it really is important to start addressing the strengths and limitations of artificial intelligence. Tell me about the technological breakthroughs we have already seen, and what you expect to see in the coming years?