Technological change has always played a role in displacing more manual forms of labour. It has also been pivotal in improving overall economic productivity and acted as a catalyst for the creation of new jobs. Increasing computational power is driving rapid advancements in automation and artificial intelligence, which will likely have a huge positive impact on industries such as healthcare and transportation as well as improving everyday life for many. However, the pace of change is such that governments are struggling to provide a safety net for those detrimentally impacted by this. In his farewell speech, Barack Obama warned: "The next wave of economic dislocations won't come from overseas. It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good middle-class jobs obsolete."

There's a scene in William Gibson's 2010 novel Zero History, in which a character embarking on a high-stakes raid dons what the narrator refers to as the "ugliest T-shirt" in existence -- a garment which renders him invisible to CCTV. In Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, a bitmap image is used to transmit a virus that scrambles the brains of hackers, leaping through computer-augmented optic nerves to rot the target's mind. These stories, and many others, tap into a recurring sci-fi trope: that a simple image has the power to crash computers. Last year, researchers were able to fool a commercial facial recognition system into thinking they were someone else just by wearing a pair of patterned glasses. A sticker overlay with a hallucinogenic print was stuck onto the frames of the specs.

Our current political climate in the United States reflects this same cognitive bias against the future. Recently, President Trump signed a sweeping executive order undoing a vast array of regulations designed to mitigate long-term climate change in favor of policies that provide much shorter-term economic benefits. And Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin recently made headlines when he said publicly that he is "not worried at all" about the possibility automation could eliminate millions or even tens of millions of American jobs in the future. "It's not even on our radar screen," he said, adding that it won't happen for "50 to 100 years or more." But, as Daniel Gross wrote in Slate, he's wrong.

FILE PHOTO - Baidu's company logo is seen at its headquarters in Beijing December 17, 2014. BEIJING Chinese internet firm Baidu Inc has agreed to acquire U.S. computer vision firm xPerception for an undisclosed amount to support their renewed efforts in artificial intelligence as Chinese tech firms face regulatory headwinds in U.S. "The acquisition of xPerception is the latest in a recent series of notable investments aimed at strengthening Baidu's position as a global leader in AI," it said. Baidu is targeting foreign personnel and technology as part of a wider drive to refocus company resources on developing artificial intelligence capabilities. Revenues from the firm's core search unit took a beating last year when the Chinese government tightened online ad regulations, culling a chunk of existing advertisers with new eligibility requirements. The announcement comes as other Chinese tech firms struggle with regulatory push-back on acquisitions in the U.S. market.

AI Arms Race Principle: An arms race in lethal autonomous weapons should be avoided.* Perhaps the scariest aspect of the Cold War was the nuclear arms race. At its peak, the US and Russia held over 70,000 nuclear weapons, only a fraction of which could have killed every person on earth. As the race to create increasingly powerful artificial intelligence accelerates, and as governments increasingly test AI capabilities in weapons, many AI experts worry that an equally terrifying AI arms race may already be under way. In fact, at the end of 2015, the Pentagon requested $12-$15 billion for AI and autonomous weaponry for the 2017 budget, and the Deputy Defense Secretary at the time, Robert Work, admitted that he wanted "our competitors to wonder what's behind the black curtain."

The rise of artificial intelligence presents not only technical challenges, but important legal and ethical challenges for society, especially regarding machines like autonomous weapons and self-driving cars. To discuss these issues, I interviewed Matt Scherer and Ryan Jenkins. Matt is an attorney and legal scholar whose scholarship focuses on the intersection between law and artificial intelligence. Ryan is an assistant professor of philosophy and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Emerging Sciences group at California Polytechnic State, where he studies the ethics of technology. In this podcast, we discuss accountability and transparency with autonomous systems, government regulation vs. self-regulation, fake news, and the future of autonomous systems. The following interview has been heavily edited for brevity, but you can listen to it in its entirety above or read the full transcript here.

When was the last time you set foot on a farm? If you're a city or suburb dweller, it's probably been quite a while. People in both the developed and developing countries largely take the food available in their grocery stores for granted today. Drive down to your local Super Target or Farmer's Market and you're presented with a seemingly endless supply of fresh fruits and vegetables. Unless you're in a poor country, like Nepal for example, where many families in villages own small pieces of land where they plant, maintain and harvest their crops manually, agriculture has largely been "mechanized."

Powerful machine-learning methods have taken the tech world by storm in recent years, vastly improving voice and image recognition, machine translation, and many other things. Now these techniques are poised to upend countless other industries, including the world of finance. But progress may be stymied by a significant problem: it's often impossible to explain how these "deep learning" algorithms reach a decision. Adam Wenchel, vice president of machine learning and data innovation at Capital One, says the company would like to use deep learning for all sorts of functions, including deciding who is granted a credit card. But it cannot do that because the law requires companies to explain the reason for any such decision to a prospective customer.

The European Robotics League has closed a successful first season. Funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Programme for research, the ERL brings a common framework for two indoor robotics competitions, ERL Industrial Robots and ERL Service Robots and one outdoor robotics competition, ERL Emergency Robots. The three competitions are designed to target three clear objectives: the European societal challenge of an aging population, the strengthening of the European robotics industry and the use of autonomous systems for emergency response. The last tournament of the ERL season 2016/17 took place at the Leon@Home Test bed located at the Módulo de Investigación en Cibernética of the Universidad de León, Spain. The ERL Service Robots local competition organised by Dr Vicente Matellan and the Leon Robotics Group was held from the 13-17 March and consisted of several trials, which mainly took place on the last day.

From drone warfare to self-checkout lines at the grocery store, the change is clear. Sales of automated industrial "robots" rose 15% year-over-year in 2015, to reach an annual record of 253,748 units, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Those units were valued at $11 billion, 9% more than the year before. That lifted the total installed base, worldwide, to 1.6 million industrial bots, a number that the IFR projects will reach 2.6 million in 2019. For investors, it smells like opportunity.