On July 20, China's State Council issued the "Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan" (新一代人工智能发展规划), which articulates an ambitious agenda for China to lead the world in AI. China intends to pursue a "first-mover advantage" to become the "premier global AI innovation center" by 2030. Through this new strategic framework, China will advance a "three in one" agenda in AI: tackling key problems in research and development, pursuing a range of products and applications, and cultivating an AI industry. The Chinese leadership thus seeks to seize a "major strategic opportunity" to advance its development of AI, potentially surpassing the United States in the process. This new plan, which will be implemented by a new AI Plan Promotion Office within the Ministry of Science and Technology, outlines China's objectives for advances in AI in three stages. First, by 2020, China's overall progress in technology and applications of AI should keep pace with the world's advanced level, while its AI industry becomes an important economic growth point.

It's hard keep track of the kind of things computers are capable of doing, or are supposedly going to be able to do by the year twenty-twenty-something. But despite the AI hype there are a few ideas which will help keep one's feet on the ground. Not even the developers who create it. The whole point of machine learning, deep learning and AI, is you accept that the computer can do it better than you can. So you program it with a set of rules which should operate like boundaries, they give the computer a sphere within which to operate.

Imagine a world where supercomputers programmed by totalitarian technocrats make virtually every important decision for you, in addition to manipulating you at every turn. Such a dystopian future for the world may not be that far off -- at least if humanity continues on its current course. And the technocrats behind the plan barely even bother to conceal their agenda at this point. The United Nations is now openly plotting with Big Business and Big Government to exploit Artificial Intelligence (AI) to further its agenda, especially the totalitarian ideology it calls "sustainable development." Multiple UN bureaucracies have convened summits this year for that purpose, bringing together leading experts in the field from around the world.

As a kid, I remember thinking about how smart adults are. I can't wait to be an adult! They are all super smart and know about things like the stock market, catching the right bus, and, like, the government and stuff! Probably the worst part about becoming an adult was realizing that there was no Matrix-style download for Adulting 101 once I turned 18. The stock market, public transportation, and the government are still mysterious things that loom large in my mind.

Drones capable of carrying explosives to countries thousands of miles away could be available in just five years, according to an expert. These terror drones could fly from Africa to the US in just over a day, a top US defence adviser told the Pentagon. Many companies are chasing a new commercial market and pushing this technology forward which means in the next few years they could become widely available. The Greased Lightening drone (pictured) can fold eight out of its ten propellers down to reach optimum efficiency. A company called Advanced Aircraft Company has created a drone called Greased Lightening which combines the best bits of drone and aeroplane design.

The Swedish government has replaced two of its ministers as it attempts to fall entirely. The crisis is the result of a growing scandal over an IT outsourcing deal, which saw almost all of Sweden's citizens have their data leaked to IT contractors in other countries. Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven has replaced two of his ministers in an attempt to stop any more dramatic fallout. But the opposition is seeking for the government to fall entirely and for the country to have an early election. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

Humans are formed from matter that flew billions of miles from another galaxy, according to a new study. Much of the stuff around us and spread throughout our Milky Way is made up of "extragalactic matter", according to the research. The study used computer models to find out how the matter around us came to be acquired by our galaxy. It found that supernova explosions throw out huge amounts of matter from galaxies, spreading it throughout the universe as it is carried on powerful galactic winds. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla (TSLA) and Space X, recently sounded the alarm that murderous artificial intelligence-powered robots could one day rampage through American neighborhoods. And the only way to stop them, he said, is to begin regulating AI before it destroys us all. Musk's warnings that AI poses an "existential threat" may have been a bit dramatic, but he's not the only expert hoping for some kind of government regulation of AI. And as companies from Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) to Facebook (FB) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL) continue pouring money into the field, those regulations may be needed sooner than later. Carnegie Mellon's Manuela Veloso, an expert on AI, doesn't believe we're even close to the point where an army of T-1000s will march down Broadway and demand our fealty. But we should have regulations of any AI-created products that reach the mass market to ensure the safety of consumers, according to Veloso, department head of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science.

One of the IoT's greatest attributes is its ability to integrate and work with other emerging technologies, as I wrote recently regarding the synergies between the IoT and blockchain. Perhaps nowhere are these synergies as great as with the IoT and Artificial Intelligence (AI). One very down-to-earth (OK, down-to-living-room-carpet) example will illustrate. My Roomba was one of the first smart-home devices. It's dogged, and eventually cleans a room by bouncing around and following a pretty random path.

Explaining underlying causes or effects about events is a challenging but valuable task. We define a novel problem of generating explanations of a time series event by (1) searching cause and effect relationships of the time series with textual data and (2) constructing a connecting chain between them to generate an explanation. To detect causal features from text, we propose a novel method based on the Granger causality of time series between features extracted from text such as N-grams, topics, sentiments, and their composition. The generation of the sequence of causal entities requires a commonsense causative knowledge base with efficient reasoning. To ensure good interpretability and appropriate lexical usage we combine symbolic and neural representations, using a neural reasoning algorithm trained on commonsense causal tuples to predict the next cause step. Our quantitative and human analysis show empirical evidence that our method successfully extracts meaningful causality relationships between time series with textual features and generates appropriate explanation between them.