There are many choices we make over the course of our lives. Some are fairly insignificant, like the clothes we put on in the morning; others, such as the vocations we settle on, have life-changing consequences. But there's one critical decision we don't get to make: the choice of being born into a human body--and all the arbitrary ailments and inevitable biological breakdowns that follow. This is what sets health care apart from other industries. The business of medicine is quite literally one of life and death. And throughout much of the world, it remains a messy, inefficient, expensive sector in need of radical reform. Just consider some of the heart-wrenching numbers.

The EU is launching an unprecedented public consultation to find out what Europeans fear most about the future of the internet. A succession of surveys over the coming weeks will ask people for their views on everything from privacy and security to artificial intelligence, net neutrality, big data and the impact of the digital world on jobs, health, government and democracy. A dozen leading European publications, including the Guardian, are to publicise the surveys over the coming three weeks. Results will be compiled in early June. Readers can complete the first questionnaire here.

There is a cliff approaching fast that India is unprepared for. It's in the near future and will be upon us in 25 or 30 years, according to the people who have understood it best. In brief it is the creation of an artificial intelligence that is smarter than man. Once this is created, it will replicate itself and improve itself faster than we can imagine, leave alone compete with. Science writers call this moment the technological singularity.

There was a time in America, not too long ago, when most people, including journalists, business leaders, politicians, and scholars, were full-throated advocates of technologically powered productivity growth. They understood that through mechanization, automation, and other forms of innovation, we can produce more, better, and cheaper goods and services, and have higher incomes. It was understood that some workers might lose their jobs after we figured out how to do them more efficiently, but most Americans believed, to quote Star Trek's Mr. Spock, that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Those days are gone, though. Current opinion now routinely echoes the mythical 19th-century machine destroyer Ned Ludd, warning in a growing avalanche of books, academic theses, market forecasts, and op-eds that technology is leading us to a world of mass unemployment, that it is creating a newly idle lumpenproletariat, and that we had better put in place a universal basic income (UBI), under which the state cuts a check to everyone, regardless of their income or work status, if we are to have any hope of avoiding mass unrest. This kind of worry, verging on "robophobia," represents a remarkable reversal from a long period in American history -- stretching from the 1890s to the early 1970s -- when most Americans sang the praises of technology as an engine of progress that not only raised our living standards but also made America great. Exultantly titled books such as Triumphs and Wonders of the 19th Century, The Marvels of Modern Mechanism, Our Wonderful Progress, and Modern Wonder Workers were common.

When an Icelander arrives at an office building and sees "Solarfri" posted, they need no further explanation for the empty premises: The word means "when staff get an unexpected afternoon off to enjoy good weather." The people of this rugged North Atlantic island settled by Norsemen some 1,100 years ago have a unique dialect of Old Norse that has adapted to life at the edge of the Artic. Hundslappadrifa, for example, means "heavy snowfall with large flakes occurring in calm wind." But the revered Icelandic language, seen by many as a source of identity and pride, is being undermined by the widespread use of English, both for mass tourism and in the voice-controlled artificial intelligence devices coming into vogue. Linguistics experts, studying the future of a language spoken by fewer than 400,000 people in an increasingly globalized world, wonder if this is the beginning of the end for the Icelandic tongue.

Tank, the roboceptionist, greeted my family and me when we visited Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, Penn. In Hamilton, not once have I received a greeting from a robot. It was fascinating to compare two steel towns; Pittsburgh and Hamilton both struggled due to the decline of manufacturing economies. Today, Pittsburgh boasts of its future as a brighter technology-centric economy surrounded by Robotics Institute, Apple, and Google. Nevertheless, Mayor Bill Peduto is facing backlash as unions are protesting the displacement of workers.

There are two things companies need to be careful of, whether they are large or small. The first is to avoid any pursuit of unrealistic products that require futuristic technologies. The second is a misinterpretation of the market demand, or the quasi-demand. It means the market actually does not need the products the company thinks are necessary. So, what profound changes may we expect AI to bring to people's life in the short run?

A supply ship bearing John Glenn's name arrived at the International Space Station on Saturday. Astronauts used the station's big robot arm to grab the capsule, as the craft flew 250 miles above Germany. NASA's commercial shipper, Orbital ATK, named the spacecraft the S.S. John Glenn in honor of the first American to orbit Earth. It rocketed from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Tuesday with nearly 7,700 pounds of food, experiments and other goods. Glenn died in December at age 95 and was buried earlier this month at Arlington National Cemetery.

It's because of the concept's many possibilities: object recognition in pictures and videos, anticipating cybersecurity threats, finding specific kinds of people amid thousands or millions in a data set. They all need to run data to learn what it is they're looking for. What if there isn't enough data to make the algorithms as good as they need to be? Or what if it takes too long to collect and prepare that data? An early stage startup that just entered a northern Virginia cybersecurity accelerator thinks it has the solution: fake data.

The future of war lies in part with what the military calls "autonomous weapons systems" (AWS), sophisticated computerized devices which, as defined by the U.S. Department of Defense, "once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator." Whether that's a good idea or a bad one is debatable, but it isn't a question of if, but how soon autonomous, artificially intelligent machines will fight side by side with human soldiers on the battlefield. United States Army General Robert W. Cone (now deceased) predicted in 2014 that as many as one-quarter of all U.S. combat soldiers might be replaced by drones and robots within the next 30 years. In the U.S., both the Army and Marine Corps are already testing remote-controlled devices like the Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System (MAARS), an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) designed primarily for reconnaissance that can also be equipped with a grenade launcher and a machine gun: The latter are known as lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS for short, or more pithily, "killer robots," as critics have dubbed them). Though they may conjure up futuristic, dystopian images redolent of The Terminator (the Arnold Schwarzenegger film about an armed super-robot from the future) or Robopocalypse (Daniel Wilson's 2011 science fiction novel about AI weapons turning on their creators), the dangers they pose are firmly rooted in reality.