Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business Section. One story stood out for me: Uber says it will introduce flying taxis in Los Angeles by 2020. "We're trying to work with cities in the early days who are interested in partnering to make it happen, while knowing that there will be pitfalls along the way," says Jeff Holden, Uber's chief product officer. Solar panels: President Trump will be presented with a plan Monday to impose restrictions and tariffs on imports of the most popular photovoltaic generating panels used in the booming U.S. residential and utility-scale solar markets. The U.S. International Trade Commission, an independent agency, has proposed the action after two international solar-panel producers with U.S. plants complained that they needed protection from low-cost imports.

Unfortunately, the WEF has withheld some of the tool's coolest features--including a "Dynamic Briefing" button that generates a multi-page dossier on a given subject--from the public release, although Jurgens says some of these may be available to paying users in the future.

AI experts have put together a seven-minute film that depicts a terrifying future where tiny killer drones are programmed to carry out mass killings. Made by an advocacy group called Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, the footage shows palm-sized drones armed with explosives finding and attacking people without human supervision. These tiny drones can kill with ruthless efficiency and campaigners warn a preemptive ban on the technology is needed to stop a new era of horrific mass destruction. In the film, machines can can spot activists in lecture halls and kill them by propelling an explosive into their head. The video starts with a developer introducing the new technology, saying these drones can react 100 times faster than a human. He says these drones have wide field cameras, face recognition, special sensors and shaped explosives.

A new Forrester Research report, Predictions 2018: Automation Alters The Global Workforce, outlines 10 predictions about the impact of AI and automation on jobs, work processes and tasks, business success and failure, and software development, cybersecurity, and regulatory compliance. We will see a surge in white-collar automation, half a million new digital workers (bots) in the US, and a shift from manual to automated IT and data management. "Companies that master automation will dominate their industries," Forrester says. Here's my summary of what Forrester predicts will be the impact of automation in 2018: Automation will eliminate 9% of US jobs but will create 2% more. In 2018, 9% of US jobs will be lost to automation, partly offset by a 2% growth in jobs supporting the "automation economy."

MOGADISHU, Somalia – The Islamic State group's growing presence in Somalia could become a "significant threat" if it attracts fighters fleeing collapsing strongholds in Syria and Iraq, experts say, and already it seems to be influencing local al-Shabab extremists to adopt tactics like beheadings. The U.S. military this month carried out its first drone strikes against IS fighters in Somalia, raising questions about the strength of the group that emerged just two years ago. A second strike targeted the fighters on Sunday, with the U.S. saying "some terrorists" were killed. The Islamic State group burst into public view in Somalia late last year as dozens of armed men seized the port town of Qandala in the northern Puntland region, calling it the seat of the "Islamic Caliphate in Somalia." They beheaded a number of civilians, causing more than 20,000 residents to flee, and held the town for weeks until they were forced out by Somali troops, backed by U.S. military advisers.

In my last article, I discussed how Artificial Intelligence can either be a boon or a bane. This totally depends on how you use the model, how you train it and what output you wish to generate. The role of AI as a boon or a bane depends much on how you train the model initially before testing the same. Today, I'll be talking about how open data has opened opportunistic doors for businesses and researchers in order to perform data analysis. Data Analysis deals with analyzing and organizing the data in such a manner that will give you some productive results.

Humanity has been on the road for a very long time--from the beginning, when each individual had to collect sufficient food to survive every single day--to the point where we invented agriculture. At that point, we moved from 99% survival and 1% reproduction to a brand new model. Growing food marked the introduction of leisure. Since then, every step in our evolution has proceeded along the lines of doing more and more with less and less. You might recall the 1899 story of Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office, lobbying President McKinley for its closure, claiming that "everything had already been invented."

In the meantime, if one of them goes berserk, here's a useful tactic: Shut the door behind you. One after another, robots in a government-sponsored contest were stumped by an unlocked door that blocked their path at an outdoor obstacle course. One bipedal machine managed to wrap a claw around the door handle and open it but was flummoxed by a breeze that kept blowing the door shut before it could pass through. Robots excel at many tasks, as long as they don't involve too much hand-eye coordination or common sense. Like some gifted children, they can perform impressive feats of mental arithmetic but are profoundly klutzy on the playground.

Artificial intelligence is already helping determine your future – whether it's your Netflix viewing preferences, your suitability for a mortgage or your compatibility with a prospective employer. But can we agree, at least for now, that having an AI determine your guilt or innocence in a court of law is a step too far? Worryingly, it seems this may already be happening. When American Chief Justice John Roberts recently attended an event, he was asked whether he could forsee a day "when smart machines, driven with artificial intelligences, will assist with courtroom fact finding or, more controversially even, judicial decision making". He responded: "It's a day that's here and it's putting a significant strain on how the judiciary goes about doing things".

Women in politics are sometimes accused of consciously exploiting their femininity to get ahead in a male-dominated world. Frances Perkins did that, but in an unusual way: she tried to remind men of their mothers. She dressed in a plain, three-cornered hat, and she refined the way she acted, based on careful observation of what seemed to be most effective in persuading men to accept her ideas. Perhaps it's no coincidence that those ideas could reasonably be described as maternal or parental. Any parent wants to shield their children from serious harm, and Perkins believed governments should do the same for their citizens. She became President Franklin D Roosevelt's Secretary of Labour in 1933.