Doom-and-gloom headlines about the shrinking number of stores in malls, closing department stores, and thinning foot traffic have been everywhere lately, and not without good reason. If one were to venture a guess based on brick-and-mortar store performance, it would appear the U.S. consumer has stopped spending. But in fact, consumer spending has been rising steadily every year since 2009. It's just that an ever-greater number of people are choosing to do their shopping online. 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%.

It's convenient when Facebook can tag your friends in photos for you, and it's fun when Snapchat can apply a filter to your face. Both are examples of algorithms that have been trained to recognize eyes, noses, and mouths with consistent accuracy. When these programs are wrong--like when Facebook mistakes you for your sibling or even your mom--it's hardly a problem. In other situations, though, we give artificial intelligence much more responsibility, with larger consequences when it inevitably backfires. Ben Shneiderman, a computer scientist from the University of Maryland, thinks the risks are big enough that it's time to for the government to get involved. In a lecture on May 30 to the Alan Turing Institute in London, he called for a "National Algorithm Safety Board," similar to the US's National Transportation Safety Board for vehicles, which would provide both ongoing and retroactive oversight for high-stakes algorithms.

Elon Musk's company SpaceX will attempt to launch a Falcon 9 rocket Saturday evening, in a bid to send a refurbished Dragon cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS). The CRS-11 mission is the eleventh for the commercial space company and was originally scheduled for Thursday evening, but had to be postponed due to weather conditions. The weather could play spoilsport once again Saturday, which has an instantaneous launch window at 5:07 p.m. EDT. According to forecast by meteorologists with the U.S. Air Force 45th Weather Squadron, announced Friday morning, there was a 60 percent chance of favorable weather at the time of the planned launch. That forecast was worse than the 70 percent favorable forecast announced Thursday night. "The primary weather concerns for Saturday's launch are anvil clouds, cumulus clouds and flight through precipitation," the forecast announcement on NASA's website said.

Gmail is introducing new machine learning to prevent people from falling for phishing attacks. People often fall for disguised phishing attacks. Google is hoping its machines won't be tricked as easily. With more than 1 billion active users on Gmail every day, its a massive job to protect them all from cyberattacks via email. Google estimates 50 to 70 percent of messages in Gmail's inboxes are spam, many of which are carefully crafted to deceive people.

It all started at Baledogle, the old Soviet airport 70 miles northwest of Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, where the U.S. runs a deeply clandestine drone operation with around 30 to 40 American personnel. While shrouded in secrecy, Baledogle has reportedly grown over the years into a key point for training Somali commandos and, early last month, for launching a joint strike against al-Shabab. The radical Islamist group grew out of the splintered factions of Sharia-based courts that filled the vacuum of authority after a U.S.-led coalition withdrew from the country in the early 90s. Today, al-Shabab sees itself as the preeminent terror force in Somalia with global ambitions. "These folks are honing their skills in a local conflict that is part of a global war they are waging against the United States," said Katherine Zimmerman, an expert on Al Qaeda at the American Enterprise Institute. Al-Shabab regularly attacks foreigners, including aid workers and Somalis, as it wages an insurgent fight against the U.S.-leaning government.

It's time to prep for Apple's next big event and carefully consider what could happen if the government legalizes "hacking back." Tune in Monday.What to expect from Apple at WWDC 2017 This week Apple will put on a big show for developers but, as usual, we're also listening. That's because we could get news about everything from an Echo-fighting Siri speaker to refreshed MacBooks and iPads. On the software side, we're expecting to find out how Siri will keep up with its AI assistant competition, and what's next for both iOS and MacOS. E3 is still more than a week away, but EA has already dropped off one big game announcement: a name, release date and trailer for the next Need for Speed.

We've seen many buzzwordy innovations in technology over the last decade, from cloud computing to big data to microservices and beyond - but artificial intelligence (AI) by far has the most buzzword baggage. On the one hand, AI is perhaps the most revolutionary set of innovations since the transistor. But on the other, the bad press surrounding it continues to mount, perhaps even faster than the innovations themselves. We didn't suffer this kind of PR nightmare with the cloud, or the web, or even client/server. In fact, AI has an unprecedented set of PR challenges that threaten to sink the entire movement.

Globally, the native digital assistant installed base is set to exceed 7.5 billion active devices by 2021, which is more than the world population according to the US Census Bureau on May 1, 2017. But fear not – Skynet, from the popular Terminator movies, does not feature among the leading digital assistants. Instead, Google Assistant will dominate the voice AI–capable device market with 23.3% market share, followed by Samsung's Bixby (14.5%), Ovum's Digital Assistant and Voice AI–Capable Device Forecast: 2016–21 found that smartphones and tablets clearly lead the voice AI–capable device market, with 3.5 billion active devices in 2016, most of which use Google Now and Apple Siri. However, the use of AI in conjunction with other devices greatly increases consumer engagement and is set to unlock new opportunities, particularly in the home. Ovum expects an exponential uptake of voice AI capabilities among new devices, including wearable, smart home, and TV devices, with a combined installed base of 1.63 billion active devices in 2021, a tenfold increase on 2016.

US Navy researchers have developed a drone system that can detect mines and other hazards. The portable, one-pound remote-controlled quadcopter drone can detect buried or underwater mines during amphibious beach landings conducted by US Marines. It was designed to help explosives disposal teams quickly find mines and dangerous metal structures within coastal areas and shallow water zones. The one-pound quadcopter was unveiled at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in San Diego County, California. It has a magnetometer sensor system - which measures magnetism - to detect mines and provide real-time search data to a handheld Android device.

The U.S. trade deficit rose in April to the highest level since January. The politically sensitive trade gap with China registered a sharp increase. The Commerce Department said on Friday that the U.S. trade gap in goods and services climbed 5.2 percent to $47.6 billion in April from March. Exports dropped 0.3 percent to $191 billion, pulled down by a drop in automotive exports. Imports rose 0.8 percent to $238.6 billion as Americans bought more foreign-made cellphones and other goods.