The capsule left the station after being released by astronauts Thomas Pesquet (of France) and Shane Kimbrough (of NASA) using a robotic arm. It's equipped with a heat shield that allows cargo to be shipped back to Earth; the journey took five hours and it splashed down off the coast of Baha, California.

The Bank of England has paired up with artificial intelligence and blockchain specialists in a bid to keep up to date with the fast-growing financial technology sector. The central bank is testing an artificial intelligence system with Canadian startup MindBridge AI to allow it to spot abnormalities in financial transactions and "explore the benefit of machine learning technology for analysing the quality of regulatory data input." It has also partnered with San Francisco-based startup Ripple, which opened an office in London last year, to trial a blockchain-based technology that would make cross-border payments and the movement of currencies more immediate. Blockchain is the technology which underpins crypto-currencies like bitcoin. The Bank said that its aim with Ripple is to "show how this kind of synchronisation might lower settlement risk and improve the speed and efficiency of cross-border payments."

Let's talk about the practical application of artificial intelligence to cybersecurity. Or rather, let's read about it. My friend Sean Martin has written a three-part series on the topic for ITSP Magazine, exploring AI, machine learning, and other related topics. I provided review and commentary into the series. The first part, "It's a Marketing Mess! Artificial Intelligence vs Machine Learning," explores probably the biggest challenge about AI: Hyperbole.

Mark Hamill is here to rescue your weekend with some good old-fashioned nostalgia. The "Star Wars" actor shared a photo Saturday morning of himself as a young Luke Skywalker posing in the Tatooine desert on the first day of filming "Star Wars: Episode IV -- A New Hope." He stands with his hands folded across his heart. "Taken in Tunisia early morning day [number one] waiting for my [first] shot (emerging from home for robot auction)," he wrote. Hamill has played Skywalker since 1977's "A New Hope," the first installation in the Star Wars movie franchise.

Le Point's cover story this week is on artificial intelligence (AI). Stanford University started a study - The One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence - in 2014. It is supposed to go on for a century and will try to anticipate how AI will affect every aspect of our lives including politics, jobs, healthcare and privacy. The elaborate article also gives an outline of the evolution of AI and the organisations involved in research and its use in self-driven cars. The piece also makes an interesting comparison between costs per hour of a human and a robot from 1990 till now.

It was one very simple sentence that won SXSW this year: "We explore, or we expire," said astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who is of course known for the Apollo 11 mission and being one of the first two humans to land on the moon. He was talking about further space travel and the push for us to become a two planet species by also inhabiting Mars. But in its simplest form, that same sentiment could be turned to business today and the need for new ways of thinking in order to survive. The interesting thing is historically that's exactly what SXSW has always been about – innovation and the next big thing. Yet for 2017, there weren't any launches like the Twitter, Foursquare or Meerkat debuts of the past to write home about, nor a big headline tech to particularly speak of. Instead and perhaps unsurprisingly, the focus was very heavily political with a particular zoom in on the fake news agenda and what that means for today's society.

This article originally appeared on The Motley Fool. Inc. has been making quite a push into the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Its most public example of this effort, Alexa, its voice-activated digital assistant, controls the Echo smart speaker and Echo Dot, which were top sellers on Amazon's website over the holidays. Those familiar with Amazon Web Services (AWS), an industry leader in cloud computing, may also be aware of the AI-based tools the company has recently made available to AWS customers: Rekognition for building image recognition apps; Polly for translating text to speech; and Lex, to build conversational bots. Amazon also is adding cyber-security to its AI resume.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has come up with some crazy ideas in the past, and its latest idea is to create computers that are always learning and adapting, much like humans. Mobile devices, computers, and gadgets already have artificial intelligence features, with notable examples being Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Alexa. But these devices can only learn and draw conclusions within the scope of information pre-programmed into systems. Existing machine-learning techniques don't allow computers to think outside the box, so to speak, or think dynamically based on the situations and circumstances. The goal of a new DARPA project is to create computers that think like biological entities and are continually learning.

There is no such thing as robot lawyers, and even if there were, they are not coming to take jobs away from human lawyers. Instead, lawyers should think about how best to work with and harness the potential of software and artificial intelligence to propel their practices forward while bridging the access-to-justice gap. Those were the main takeaways in a wide-ranging Friday morning panel discussion at ABA Techshow featuring Ross Intelligence CEO Andrew Arruda, IBM Global Chief Information Security Officer Shamla Naidoo and FastCase CEO Ed Walters. The three gave a brief history and overview of artificial intelligence, while dispelling some myths and cautioning those in attendance to temper their expectations as to what AI can and can't do. "This is tech that's been around for 60 to 80 years," Arruda said.

In her SXSW session, titled Dark Days: AI and the Rise of Fascism, Crawford, who studies the social impact of machine learning and large-scale data systems, explained ways that automated systems and their encoded biases can be misused, particularly when they fall into the wrong hands. "Just as we are seeing a step function increase in the spread of AI, something else is happening: the rise of ultra-nationalism, rightwing authoritarianism and fascism," she said. All of these movements have shared characteristics, including the desire to centralize power, track populations, demonize outsiders and claim authority and neutrality without being accountable. Machine intelligence can be a powerful part of the power playbook, she said. One of the key problems with artificial intelligence is that it is often invisibly coded with human biases.