It may sound strange, but a number of prominent people have been asking this question lately. As fears about the impact of automation grow, calls for a "robot tax" are gaining momentum. Earlier this month, the European parliament considered one for the EU. Benoît Hamon, the French Socialist party presidential candidate who is often described as his country's Bernie Sanders, has put a robot tax in his platform. Even Bill Gates recently endorsed the idea.

Nasa isn't about to announce it has made contact with aliens, despite a hugely viral video, the agency has confirmed. The video – posted on an account associated with the hacking collective Anonymous – had claimed that Nasa was "on the verge" of making a new announcement on the discovery of alien life. The long and sometimes rambling footage used a range of evidence to suggest that the agency had discovered something that it would be making public soon. But Nasa has now confirmed that, as thought, there's no new evidence of life on Earth. At least according to senior scientist Thomas Zurbuchen, upon whose comments much of the video was based.

Artificial Intelligence is not coming; it's already here. AI tools are becoming an integral part of organizational decisionmaking in both the public and private sector by evaluating large amounts of data to quickly arrive at conclusions. Public agencies are leveraging AI tools to become smarter, more efficient, and more responsive. For instance, the Cincinnati Fire Department is using data analytics to optimize medical emergency responses. The new analytics system recommends the dispatcher an appropriate response to a medical emergency call – whether a patient can be treated on-site or needs to be taken to the hospital – by taking into account several factors such as the type of call, location, weather, and similar calls.

Today, the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate announced the release of a virtual training platform for active shooter incidents. The Enhanced Dynamic Geo-Social Environment, or EDGE, is a program that creates a virtual active shooter scenario through which first responders can train themselves. EDGE launches today and is free for all first responders. The platform was built on Epic Games' Unreal engine, which has also been used to create training programs for NASA astronauts and the US Army. The scenario that's available now is set in a 26-story hotel in Sacramento, California and every part of the hotel is accessible to the trainee.

The grid connects computers in more than 40 countries from more than 170 research facilities, and works like a power grid to some extent, providing computing resources to facilities based on demand. This presents a unique cybersecurity challenge: keeping the massive globally-distributed grid secure while maintaining the computing power and storage unimpeded. Machine learning can train a system to detect potential threats while retaining the flexibility that it needs to provide computing power and storage on demand. If they work well protecting just the part of the grid that ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) uses, the team can deploy AI cybersecurity measures throughout the system.

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DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is researching autonomous co-piloting so they can fly without a human pilot on board. The robotic system -- called the Common Aircraft Retrofit for Novel Autonomous Control (CARNAC) (not to be confused with the old Johnny Carson Carnac routine) -- has the potential to reduce costs, enable new missions, and improve performance. Unmanned aircraft are generally built from scratch with robotic systems integrated from the earliest design stages. Existing aircraft require extensive modification to add robotic systems. RE2, the CMU spin-off located in Pittsburgh, makes mobile manipulators for defense and space.

Anonymous claims Nasa is about to announce it has found alien life. The truth is a little more complicated – but no less wondrous. An account affiliated with the hacking and activism collective has released a viral video claiming Nasa is "on the verge" of detailing contact with extraterrestrial species. It takes much of its evidence from the work the space agency is doing to explore space and look for alien worlds across the universe. And while such claims might overestimate just how quickly the discovery will emerge, they are based in the truth.

The Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) will host the first European- Commission funded European Robotics League (ERL) tournament for service robots to be held in the UK. Two teams from the BRL and Birmingham will pitch their robots against each other in a series of events from 26 and 30 June. Robots designed to support people with care-related tasks in the home will be put to the test in a simulated home test bed. The assisted living robots of the two teams will face various challenges, including understanding natural speech and finding and retrieving objects for the user. The robots will also have to greet visitors at the door appropriately, such as welcoming a doctor on their visit, or turning away unwanted visitors.

New Delhi: In order to become a frontrunner in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), India should take the lead in establishing a legal infrastructure on its application, a study said here on Thursday. According to a recent Assocham-PwC joint study titled "Leveraging artificial intelligence and robotics for sustainable growth", an early public sector interest could trigger a spurt of activity in the AI field in India, instead of waiting for technology to reach a level where regulatory intervention becomes necessary. The study said a range of applications for AI techniques in large-scale public endeavours like "Make in India", "Skill India" and others could range from crop insurance schemes, tax fraud detection, detecting subsidy leakage and security strategy. "If investments are made in the two initiatives without due cognisance of how Industry 4.0 (the next industrial revolution driven by robotic automation) may evolve with respect to demand for workforce size and skill sets, there is a possibility of ending up with capital-intensive infrastructures and assets that fall short of being optimised for automated operations and a large workforce skilled in areas growing beyond the need for manual intervention only," it added. Information technology (IT), manufacturing, agriculture and forestry are certain sectors that are expected to experience shrinkage of employment demand as robotic systems and machine learning algorithms take up several tasks, the study said.