Robots are taking our jobs. Almost everything you can learn in our current education system will be automated soon. Supply chains are in upheaval as production moves closer to the consumer and products are made by individual robots rather than rows of underpaid workers. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are threatening thousands of white-collar jobs. As manufacturing shifts away from the traditional Asian hubs, shipping lines now suffer from massive overcapacity that will probably stay for a long time. We are aware of all of these trends.

Steven Croft, the Lord Bishop of Oxford, who is a member of the House of Lords' Artificial Intelligence Committee, said jobs would be lost as more "mundane tasks" become automated. His comments come as experts have warned robots could take over from humans as developments in artificial intelligence threaten to become smarter than those who create it. Speaking on Sunday on BBC Radio 4, Dr Croft said issues needed to be tackled including our use of data. Asked where future pressure points could arise, he said: "The first one I would say is data and the issue of control of our data, which is really slightly out of control at the moment and the Government is proposing new legislation this year to catch up with the technology.

In one Pennsylvania high school, more than 15 languages are spoken in a student body of nearly 4,000. WASHINGTON -- In middle school, Junior Alvarado often struggled with multiplication and earned poor grades in math, so when he started his freshman year at Washington Leadership Academy, a charter high school in the nation's capital, he fretted that he would lag behind. But his teachers used technology to identify his weak spots, customize a learning plan just for him and coach him through it. This past week, as Alvarado started sophomore geometry, he was more confident in his skills. "For me personalized learning is having classes set at your level," Alvarado, 15, said in between lessons.

Blue marker in hand, the 22-year-old hunches slightly to jot down suggestions being shouted by a group of people deep into a brainstorming session. Dressed mostly in nerdy T-shirts (one reads Science! with a test tube in place of the letter i), they're trying to come up with names for a tech tool they plan to build during a two-day hackathon at Tufts University's data lab. The group includes computer science PhD candidates, mathematicians, political operatives, and experts in so-called geographic information systems, or GIS. That's the mapping technology that underlies many apps and software tools that run our lives, from Google Maps to logistics software. It also comes in handy when you're carving the American electorate into voting districts that favor your political party, a time-honored--and reviled--tradition known as gerrymandering.

IMAGE: Scientists will use ORNL's computing resources such as the Titan supercomputer to develop deep learning solutions for data analysis. A team of researchers from Oak Ridge National Lab oratory has been awarded nearly $2 million over three years from the Department of Energy to explore the potential of machine learning in revolutionizing scientific data analysis. The Advances in Machine Learning to Improve Scientific Discovery at Exascale and Beyond (ASCEND) project aims to use deep learning to assist researchers in making sense of massive datasets produced at the world's most sophisticated scientific facilities. Deep learning is an area of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks to enable self-learning devices and platforms. The team, led by ORNL's Thomas Potok, includes Robert Patton, Chris Symons, Steven Young and Catherine Schuman.

ABOARD THE USS NIMITZ -- High above the Persian Gulf, an Iranian drone crosses the path of American fighter jets lining up to land on the USS Nimitz. The drone buzzes across the sky more than a mile above the massive aircraft carrier and is spotted by the fighters. But for the senior Navy commanders on the ship, the presence of the enemy drone so close is worrying. Their biggest fear is the surveillance aircraft will start carrying weapons, posing a more direct threat to U.S. vessels transiting one of the world's most significant strategic and economic international waterways. "It's just a matter of time before we see that," said Navy Rear Adm. Bill Byrne, commander of the carrier strike group that includes the Nimitz.

John Taylor, a Stanford University economist famous for the "Taylor Rule" that lays out a rules-based approach to setting monetary policy, participated in all the conference discussions. Also present was Glenn Hubbard, dean of the Columbia University Business School, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers in the George W. Bush administration and has often been mentioned when the Fed's top job has come open. In his July interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump said he had other candidates in addition to Yellen and Cohn but he declined to name them.

In a refreshing change of pace, this week's security news included little to no escalation of nuclear rhetoric. Let's count that as a win! Digital financial services provider Enigma, for instance, lost its supporters almost $500,000 in cryptocurrency thanks to bad password habits. Domestic helper robots lost security cred by being hacked into tiny robotic Chucky dolls. The US government nearly lost a security-focused ranking of industries, coming in 16 out of 18.

If you receive post in London this month, there's a good chance it arrived to your door via an electric postal truck. Royal Mail is trialling nine British-made fully electric commercial vehicles this month, transporting packages between mail and distribution centres in the capital. The firm hopes that the trial will increase Royal Mail's efficiency, and reduce vehicle emissions. While the trucks will have human drivers, they are'autonomous-ready', which suggests that Royal Mail deliveries could one day be made by driverless vehicles. However, Royal Mail says it has'no current plans' to roll out the technology.

Over the last few years, there has been a worldwide resurgence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the point where it dominates almost all business, investment, and ethical narratives. There have formed two extreme views of AI: In one it is believed that AI will augment humans, and in the other it is believed that AI will diminish them, to the point of even threatening humanity's existence. The truth will lie somewhere in between. Many of the arguments on both sides are informed by the results stemming from a technique called Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) that has given AI anthropomorphic qualities often associated with human motivations. The techniques used to train AI algorithms, broadly called Machine Learning, essentially mimic Operant Conditioning, which includes positive and negative reinforcement methods to increase the rate of a particular desired outcome or decrease the rate of an undesired outcome.