It's going to take us a healthy dollop of faith in technology to accept autonomous vehicles at some point on our roadways. The thought of robot-driven planes ferrying hundreds of people overhead to their destinations conjures images of metal, fire, and passengers raining down from the skies. Still, proponents of such systems believe autonomous transport of all kinds, including commercial flight, will be less prone to error when humans are removed from the equation. Once the bugs have been worked out, of course. The U.S. military believe automated aircraft may improve mission safety and success rates, and their Defense Advanced Research Agency, or DARPA, has just announced the successful simulated flight and landing of a Boeing 737 by an AI-driven robot co-pilot named ALIAS.

EARLIER this year Françoise Hardy, a French musician, appeared in a YouTube video (see link). She is asked, by a presenter off-screen, why President Donald Trump sent his press secretary, Sean Spicer, to lie about the size of the inauguration crowd. Then she says Mr Spicer "gave alternative facts to that". It's all a little odd, not least because Françoise Hardy (pictured), who is now 73, looks only 20, and the voice coming out of her mouth belongs to Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to Mr Trump. The video, called "Alternative Face v1.1", is the work of Mario Klingemann, a German artist.

Last Thursday, Texas senior senator John Cornyn stood before an audience of wonks at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC, and warned that America's openness to investors looking for new ideas in technologies like artificial intelligence was putting it in danger. "Most of what China wants to invest in these days is leading-edge US technology that's a key to our future military capabilities," he said. "Unless the trend line changes, we may one day see some of these technologies incorporated in China-made equipment that can be used against our country in the event, heaven forbid, of a military conflict." Cornyn highlighted China's interest in robotics and artificial intelligence as particularly concerning. His warning--and pledge to introduce legislation that could restrict Chinese investment in technology companies--came the week after Reuters reported, citing unidentified Trump administration officials, that the administration is considering a similar policy, also motivated in part by fears of China gaining access to valuable AI knowledge. However, Cornyn's diagnosis and proposed cure could lead to a result opposite to the intended one.

Sean Lane, Chairman and CEO of CrossChx based in United States participates in Risk Roundup to discuss Artificial Intelligence based Healthcare System. Sean is a lifelong technologist who grew up in a small, rural town in Ohio and started his career in the U.S. intelligence community, holding leadership positions in the Department of Defense and the National Security Agency. Sean served five combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and was awarded the Defense Meritorious Service Medal and Bronze Star Medal for his service. After government service, Sean started his life as an entrepreneur and has founded several technology companies dealing with big data, advanced analytics, entity resolution, and most recently, artificial intelligence. Sean has raised over $40M in venture capital, and is now a leading expert in applying AI to healthcare.

The need for machine learning within the Federal government and the Department of Defense (DoD) is loud and clear, as illustrated in the following comments. Robert Work, Deputy Secretary of Defense stated, "Numerous studies have made clear that the DoD must integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning more effectively across operations to maintain advantages over increasingly capable adversaries and competitors. Although we have taken tentative steps to explore the potential of artificial intelligence, big data, and deep learning, I remain convinced that we need to do much more, and move much faster across DoD to take advantage of recent and future advances in these critical areas." Lt. Gen. John N.T. "Jack" Shanahan, Director of Defense Intelligence, Warfighter Support, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, commented: "The first and perhaps most important step [to solving our data problem] is to understand that it is not possible to solve these problems with brute force alone. Adding 1,000 more intelligence analysts is neither realistic nor feasible in today's fiscal environment. We must instead find creative ways to adapt to this new environment in which we are already deeply immersed. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning [are] the critical base ingredients in the recipe for future success."

Macau, the gambling capital of the world, is upgrading all 1,200 of its ATMs with facial recognition cameras. According to Bloomberg, any user looking to make a withdrawal will need to enter their PIN and then stare into a lens for six seconds to verify your identity. The move is partly to improve bank security, but mostly to enable China to keep an eye on who's doing what with their cash, and when. The backstory here is that huge amounts of Chinese money flows out of the country without the consent of the government. Apparently, around $816 billion was expropriated from the land, both by private citizens and officials with their hand in the till.

NASA has released an image from one of its Mars rovers which shows a part of the red planet where ancient lava behaved once like liquid water. The government agency has dubbed it the "Niagara Falls of Mars." Thanks to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), NASA has a 3D image of the northern rim of a 30-kilometer crater on the western part of the Tharsis volcanic province. The image shows that the lava surrounded the crater rim, ultimately breaching the crater rim at four locations to produce lava falls, one in the northwest and the rest in the north. "In a close-up image the rough-textured lava flow to the north has breached the crater wall at a narrow point, where it then cascades downwards, fanning out and draping the steeper slopes of the wall in the process," NASA said in a statement on its website.

WASHINGTON – Across their three presidential debates last year, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump uttered the word "jobs" 86 times – but the word "automation" never came up. And by all accounts, nothing is going to transform the American labor market more dramatically, and likely for the worse, than the increasing trend toward automation: on assembly lines, in self-driving cars, even clerical and white-collar positions once considered unthinkable for robots to occupy. Credible projections now forecast that 40 percent of all jobs in the United States today could be eliminated by 2030, just 13 years from now, have led futurists, labor market analysts, and leading CEOs to ask what will become of all the workers soon to be displaced by technology, and whether industrialized democratic societies, seeking stability in such a radically reshaped economic environment, might benefit from some orderly redistribution of wealth. And leading the charge are two of America's most prominent titans of the digital age. In a commencement address to graduates at Harvard University last month, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said the coming wave of automation and displacement will require "a new social contract" between the government and the governed.

Every serious technology company now has an Artificial Intelligence team in place. These companies are investing millions into intelligent systems for situation assessment, prediction analysis, learning-based recognition systems, conversational interfaces, and recommendation engines. Companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon aren't just employing AI, but have made it a central part of their core intellectual property. As the market has matured, AI is beginning to move into enterprises that will use it but not develop it on their own. They see intelligent systems as solutions for sales, logistics, manufacturing, and business intelligence challenges. They hope AI can improve productivity, automate existing process, provide predictive analysis, and extract meaning from massive data sets.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau's monthly retail report, retail sales were up 4.5% year over year in April, but online sales grew 12%. Online retailers have long had an information advantage over their brick-and-mortar peers, as they are able to gather vital data about their customers (such as their age, gender, and location) as well as data on things like what people are looking at and how long they are staying on a page. For example, floor-level cameras can track traffic and where people are spending time in stores, and can predict information like age and gender by analyzing video of shoes. Nicholas has been a writer for the Motley Fool since 2015, covering companies in the consumer goods and technology sector.