Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk recently emphasized the threat Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses on the human race. In an open letter to the United Nations, Musk and other robotic experts, said artificial super intelligence would lead to "lethal autonomous weapons" that would bring the "third revolution in warfare". The letter was signed by 115 robotic experts who feel the need to raise the alarm on artificially intelligent robots – which they state, are a present danger and not necessarily a threat coming in the distant future. If you're not concerned about AI safety, you should be. The letter states that this Pandora's box will be hard to close, once it is opened.

The iPhone has been my primary smartphone for well over a decade, and therefore I've had Siri on my phone ever since its introduction in 2011. But I never really found a reason to use it. I've always felt self-conscious when talking to my phone -- I find people who use voice commands in public really annoying -- so I wanted to avoid doing it myself. I have Bluetooth in my car so I don't have to use my phone while driving, and when I'm at home, I have my trusty fingers instead. So I imagined that being forced to use Siri for a whole week was going to be a nightmare.

SpaceX is poised to fire off a fresh Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday, delivering a comically tiny payload for Taiwan's National Space Organization. At 1,047 pounds, the Formosat-5 Earth-observing satellite is almost light enough for a human to deadlift--but it'll launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket with 50 times more capacity. The overkill is thanks to a years-long delay, and SpaceX will take a substantial financial hit to make good on a contract it signed in 2010. Elon Musk's spaceflight company will attempt to launch the rocket from Vandenberg Air Force base in California during a 42-minute window opening at 11:51am PDT on Thursday. The satellite is bound for heliosynchronous orbit, where it will pass over Taiwan every two days for data retrieval. After the lightest single payload to ever hitch a ride on a Falcon 9 separates, the booster will fly back for a drone ship landing--hopefully to be reused in future, more economically viable missions.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Arend Hintze is a renowned assistant professor of Integrative Biology and Computer Science from Michigan State University. By day, he work on artificial intelligence technologies, trying to bridge the gap between humanity and machine. But by night, he is haunted by the consequences of his research. When the critics rose voice against the ethical nature of AIs, and were dismissed by so called shallow AI researchers, he came forward and put on his views on the same. And honestly, it does make sense.

Police forces hold more than 20million mugshots and this risks undermining public confidence, a watchdog has warned. Professor Paul Wiles, the independent Biometrics Commissioner, said there was a real danger the number of facial recognition images stored would rocket. He said the lack of laws controlling the use of the crime-fighting technology risked damaging confidence in the UK's model of policing by consent. Forces store more than 20million pictures and videos, known as custody images, taken at police stations of people they have arrested or questioned. Professor Paul Wiles, the independent Biometrics Commissioner, said there was a real danger the number of facial recognition images stored would rocket.

The death of a man strapped to a chair for 46 hours in a San Luis Obispo County jail puts a focus on the conditions for mentally ill inmates in California's county jails. Here are the stories you shouldn't miss today: Andrew Holland's legs and arms were shackled to a chair in a jail observation cell, where he sat in his own filth, eating and drinking almost nothing, for nearly two days in January. He was naked except for a helmet and mask covering his face and a blanket that slipped off his lap. San Luis Obispo County jail officials say Holland, who had schizophrenia, was restrained because he had been hitting himself in the head and was kept there because he refused to not harm himself further. Within 40 minutes of being unbound, he had stopped breathing. Holland's death has provoked outrage, a $5-million legal settlement and questions about the way California jails handle a growing number of mentally ill inmates.

Depending on whom you ask, robots and artificial intelligence are either coming to take your job, or you're perfectly safe, at least for the near future. Truth is, automation always has and always will put people out of work. It's just that this time around, even highly skilled jobs may be imperiled. And that has some folks dreading a time in which robots and AI upend the human workforce. Included among those folks is San Francisco supervisor Jane Kim, who Wednesday launched a campaign called the Jobs of the Future Fund to study a statewide "payroll" tax on job-stealing machines.

People have a weird obsession with games likes Chess and Go. Achievement in them has long been seen as a marker of human intellect, and yet they're among the least human test you could devise; putting players in simplified situations where everything is known, every possible course of action is laid out for them, and the test is one of concentration and logic. We pass far greater tests daily, when we recognise a face in a crowd, when we dynamically balance in motion, when we predict the response our words and expressions will have on another sentient being, or when we do all of the above, effortlessly, at the same time. We don't think of these as challenging because they're so innately human, while playing Chess or Go seems far more impressive precisely because they're more rigid and computational in nature. There's an irony in making a board game one of the'grand challenges' of AI, and it surprises me that more people don't see it.

Forty years ago, NASA launched twin robotic explorers on a mission to travel farther out than any spacecraft had gone before, and today, they continue to be our most distant emissaries. The story of those probes, and of the people behind them, is the focus of the aptly-titled documentary, "The Farthest," airing Wednesday (Aug. The Voyager probes, referred to by numerical designators "1" and "2," revealed the outer planets of our solar system and then continued to sail beyond. Voyager 2, which was the first to launch on Aug. 20, 1977, visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 departed Earth on Sep. 5, 1977, overtook its counterpart, and was the first to arrive at Jupiter and Saturn.

Drones soon will be used in Tanzania to deliver medicines to health facilities across the East African country, continuing a trend of African governments embracing drone networks to deliver critical services.