Biological organisms are pretty good at navigating life's unpredictability, but computers are embarrassingly bad at it. That's the crux of a new military research program that aims to model artificially intelligent systems after the brains of living creatures. When an organism encounters a new environment or situation, it relies on past experience to help it make a decision. Current artificial intelligence technology, on the other hand, relies on extensive training on various data sets, and if it hasn't encountered a specific situation, it can't select a next step. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Activity is searching for technology that constantly updates its decision-making framework to incorporate past experience and new "lessons learned" to situations it encounters.

Self-driving is emerging from being a niche technology towards being a mainstream automotive technology. Many experts consider self-driving the way of the future. But with the advancement in driving, it also brings out complexities. All traffic laws and legislation related to driving have been enacted with regards to humans behind the wheel. The prospect of cars being autonomously driven based on automotive technology may throw out a lot we know and think about driving.

It costs a stupendous amount of money to send something from the surface of Earth to the surface of Mars, and there are severe limits on the volume and mass that you can send at any one time. In order to stuff the maximum amount of science into the minimum amount of space, NASA has had to get creative, with landers and rovers designed to be lightweight and foldable. At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif., engineers have long been trying to cram as much robot as possible into the absolute minimum amount of space, and a team of roboticists there recently showed us their latest creation: PUFFER, the Pop-Up Flat Folding Explorer Robot. It's designed to pack down nearly flat for transport, and then re-expand on site to investigate all the places a bigger rover can't quite reach. The overall idea with PUFFER is that you'd pack a bunch of them along with the next Mars rover, and send them out whenever you want to go somewhere that it would be either risky or impossible for the larger rover to go.

Artificial Intelligence is the hot topic of 2017. It can build cars, detect cancer, and Elon Musk created a company that will utilize AI to make us smarter. AI even made it onto the big screen in Hollywood starring Scarlett Johansen in "Ghost in the Shell." How is such an exciting and futuristic technology like AI ever really going to impact people on a practical level? Dr. Piali De is the Brown University physicist recognized for inventing the AI system that our U.S. Intelligence Agencies used after 9/11 to detect airplanes that could be a terrorist threat.

In this excerpt from the #TalkingTech Live podcast, host Jefferson Graham and panelists Tov Arnerson and Dawn Chmielewski weigh over the possible laptop and tablet ban on flights from Europe--will we survive? As if airline flights haven't gotten stressful enough, here comes the latest twist. The Department of Homeland Security is reportedly considering a laptop ban on flights from Europe to the U.S. (Photo: Hero Images, Getty Images) The Department of Homeland Security is considering banning computers aboard flights from Europe to the United States, because it believes terrorists could conceivably convert a laptop into a bomb, according to news reports. . Tell me it's not so. Snap's rough start as a public company, a watch from Microsoft that can calm Parkinson's tremors, and a new touch screen Amazon Echo all grabbed headlines this week.

Officials have claimed in the wake of the global ransomware attack that patient care has been unaffected despite 45 NHS sites being hit. But hospitals across England and Scotland were forced to cancel routine procedures and divert emergency cases in the wake of the attack, which has shut down access to computers in almost 100 countries. I have been unable to look after patients properly. However much they pretend patient safety is unaffected – it's not true. At my hospital we are literally unable to do any X-rays, which are an essential component of emergency medicine.

Germany, home to one of the world's largest automotive industries, passed a law Friday, which would allow autonomous cars to be tested on the country's public roads, Reuters reported Friday. The move could provide the country an advantage over the U.S., as it is still quibbling over self-driving legislation here. The German Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt called self-driving, "the greatest mobility revolution since the invention of the car." According to the report, the new law would allow human drivers assigned to self-driven vehicles to remove their hands from the steering, giving vehicle makers a chance to get an accurate assessment of the functioning of self-driven vehicles. However, the law still requires human drivers to stay in the driving seat, in case they need to take control at any time during the self-driving trials.

In the last ten years, artificial intelligence has changed the world in subtle but sweeping ways, but it's got nothing on the coming decade, if you look at what's being developed today. Voice recognition on every smartphone were simple proofs of concept. Over the next 10 years, artificial intelligence will make more progress than in the fifty before it, combined. With countless quickly oncoming applications to business, government, and personal life, its influence will soon touch absolutely every aspect of our lives. Here are 25 surprising ways life and society that will be forever changed by artificial intelligence over the coming decade.

The period covered by the study ended right before the recession of 2007–09. Acemoglu and Restrepo said the recession introduced too many variables that affected employment, which would have made it more difficult to isolate the impact of robots. So what's happened since the recession, and what does it mean for manufacturing jobs? We gathered and plotted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for various manufacturing sectors to try to get a better sense. Obviously, this type of analysis doesn't let you draw the direct conclusions Acemoglu and Restrepo were able to make about robots.

Things don't look good for Uber and autonomous vehicle wunderkind Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer who now leads the startup's robocar program. This week, US District Court William Alsup made two decisive decisions in the lawsuit between Google's autonomous vehicle spinoff Waymo and Uber. You know, the one accusing Levandowski of swiping 14,000 confidential documents from and taking them with him to Uber. First, Alsup rebuffed Uber's efforts to settle the case in arbitration, so the drama will play out publicly during a trial. "We welcome the court's decision today, and we look forward to holding Uber responsible in court for its misconduct," it said in a statement.