About half of millennials looking for work are interested in jobs that carry a risk of automation, a new study suggests. The findings indicate the youngest and most educated generation in the American workforce isn't necessarily more robot-proof than older workers, who tend to be portrayed as the primary victims of automation. "Millennials show a considerable amount of interest in occupations that face a threat of automation," said Daniel Culbertson, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, the research institute attached to the international job site, and the author of the report. "That gets lost when people talk about millennials being so highly educated and more interested in tech roles." A college degree doesn't protect against robot rivals because even well-paid, highly skilled jobs could shrink or vanish in the near future, he said. Recent graduates who land high salaries aren't impervious if their job is characterized by repetitive tasks and decisions.

The future is dystopian: a world in which we humble humans will be replaced by fleets of slick automatons – mechanical menials destined to not only solder, weld and glue us out of jobs, but account, diagnose, and translate us out, too. Or, so goes a certain line of argument. Certainly, there have been some heavyweight concerns voiced about the rise of artificial intelligence. Of course, there are counterarguments too. Just as the Industrial Revolution sparked fears around the supplanting of man by machine (fears which lead some as far as destroying the new mechanical marvels: hence today's use of the word'Luddite' to denote those opposed to technological progress), all new vistas are likely to provoke both optimism and hesitance.

Few technological advancements bring to mind the American spirit of innovation like Henry Ford and his Model T. In the wake of his transportation innovation, the horse and buggy became an anachronism as the mass-produced automobile reshaped our cities, led to the emergence (for better or worse) of the suburbs, and revolutionized how we move goods and people. Ryan Hagemann (@RyanLeeHagemann) is the director of technology policy at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian issue advocacy organization based in Washington, DC. Now, there's little doubt that autonomous vehicles are the next frontier of transportation. These vehicles are projected to make our roads safer, potentially reducing fatalities by orders of magnitude. Along the way, however, there are a number of roadblocks to surmount: infrastructure issues, restrictive state licensing policies, driver education, cybersecurity and privacy vulnerabilities, and more.

This March, a truck pulled onto a runway in Oregon, towing a miniature plane for a test flight. At 650 pounds, the plane was too large to be a toy, but too small to fit a pilot. That's because the ArcticShark isn't a toy, and it doesn't need a pilot. Department of Energy scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory commissioned its design in order to fly over the Alaska North Slope to take data in the Arctic atmosphere. As it flies through the air at a modest 75 miles per hour, the drone will measure the size of atmospheric particles, levels of infrared radiation, humidity, wind direction, and more--measurements that will help scientists understand basic atmospheric processes like how clouds form, which they could eventually apply to climate models.

This article originally appeared on the Motley Fool. Ever since the United States retired its space shuttle fleet in 2011, NASA astronauts have had to hitch rides to the International Space Station (ISS) in Russian Soyuz spaceships -- paying Russian space agency Roscosmos for the privilege. The plan is for NASA to soon switch over sometime soon to using its own rockets -- built by SpaceX and Boeing (NYSE:BA) and Lockheed Martin's (NYSE:LMT) United Launch Alliance joint venture -- but it remains an open question when these companies will have their spacecraft ready for use. In the meantime, American astronauts must continue to fork over $82 million a seat in payment for rides aboard Soyuz. And what is Russia doing with all that money, you ask?

Reality check: On average, U.S. pipelines are made with about 30% domestic steel components, according to data by IHS Global Insight and the International Trade Association. There are very few, and in some cases zero, U.S. companies that make steel for the parts required by large pipelines, so companies look abroad, according to a letter the American Petroleum Institute and four other groups recently sent to the Commerce Department, which is studying the issue at the request of Trump.

News headlines might not be the only things that are fake in the future. Powerful machine-learning techniques (see "The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI") are making it increasingly easy to manipulate or generate realistic video and audio, and to impersonate anyone you want with amazing accuracy. A smartphone app called FaceApp, released recently by a company based in Russia, can automatically modify someone's face to add a smile, add or subtract years, or swap genders. The app can also apply "beautifying" effects that include smoothing out wrinkles and, more controversially, lightening the skin. And last week a company called Lyrebird, which was spun out of the University of Montreal, demonstrated technology that it says can be used to impersonate another person's voice.

Good parties diverge widely; all bad parties are bad in the same way. I am trapped at a dull dinner following a dull talk: part of a series of dinners and talks that grad students organise, unpaid (though at considerable expense to themselves--experience! exposure!), to provide free content for the dull grad program I will soon leave. The Thai food is good. The man sitting across from me and a little down the way, a bellicose bore of vague continental origin, is execrable. He is somehow attached to a mild woman who is actually supposed to be here: a shy, seemingly blameless new grad student who perpetually smiles apologetically on his behalf, in an attempt to excuse whatever he's just said. One immediately understands that she spends half her life with that worry in her eyes, that Joker-set to her mouth, and that general air of begging your pardon for offences she hadn't even had the pleasure of committing. There is always such a woman at bad parties. She has always either found ...

An artificial intelligence accurately predicted Donald Trump's less-than-stellar first 100-day approval rating down to the percentage point. Unanimous AI was challenged by reporters at Modern Trader magazine to use its Swarm AI to predict the president's rating at the end of his first milestone in office. The machine correctly came up with the historically low figure of 42 percent--the same result presented by the latest ABC News/Washington Post polls. Not every outlet came up with the same approval rating for Trump's first 100 days. The CNN/ORC poll gave the president a 44 percent approval rating, while Gallup puts it at an even lower 41 percent.

When civil liberties advocates discuss the dangers of new policing technologies, they often point to sci-fi films like "RoboCop" and "Minority Report" as cautionary tales. In "RoboCop," a massive corporation purchases Detroit's entire police department. After one of its officers gets fatally shot on duty, the company sees an opportunity to save on labor costs by reanimating the officer's body with sleek weapons, predictive analytics, facial recognition, and the ability to record and transmit live video. Although intended as a grim allegory of the pitfalls of relying on untested, proprietary algorithms to make lethal force decisions, "RoboCop" has long been taken by corporations as a roadmap. And no company has been better poised than Taser International, the world's largest police body camera vendor, to turn the film's ironic vision into an earnest reality.