Britain's top law enforcement official says it is legal to kill militants overseas if they pose an immediate or otherwise unstoppable threat. Attorney General Jeremy Wright is using a speech Wednesday to lay out the legal basis for the use of lethal force. Excerpts were released in advance. A Royal Air Force drone strike in Syria killed three Islamic State group fighters in 2015, including two Britons. It was the first such strike acknowledged by the British government.

Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, and the Omidyar Network, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's nonprofit, have each committed $10 million to fund academic research and development aimed at keeping artificial intelligence systems ethical and preventing building AI that may harm society. The fund received an additional $5 million from the Knight Foundation and two other $1 million donations from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Jim Pallotta, founder of the Raptor Group. The $27 million reserve is being anchored by MIT's Media Lab and Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. The Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund, the name of the fund, expects to grow as new funders continue to come on board. Mossberg: Streaming TV is beginning to look a lot like cable Recode Daily: Spy chiefs warned Trump of a report that Russia has dirt on him Here's how to watch Donald Trump's first press conference since winning the election While AI has obvious benefits -- it can be used to scan through troves of data to detect cancer and automate driving to reduce fatalities -- a lot of very smart people, including the White House and Elon Musk's nonprofit Open AI, have warned how artificially intelligent systems can go awry.

In his final Twitter post as President Obama's deputy Chief Technology Officer, Ed Felten dryly notes one of his accomplishments: "Robot apocalypses: 0." Robots and automation have received lots of attention over the past year, with much of the interest ranging from alarmist to curious. Elon Musk has said that robots will take your job. And, at the recently concluded 50th annual Consumer Electronics Show, companies rolled out robots to monitor your child and brew your coffee and tea. Robots are everywhere, except, as it turns out, in the data. To be clear, I don't mean there's no data about robots.

Norway has become the first country to switch off FM radio despite concerns about the move being premature. The northern county of Nordland stopped broadcasting using analogue frequencies on Wednesday as the Government plans to roll out digital-only radio over the course of the year. Oslo hopes the measure will save 200 million Norwegian krone (£19 million) a year as the country has struggled to make sure its ageing FM equipment still emits signals over its vast, sparsely populated territory, which is covered in signal-blocking fijords and forests. Stephen Lax, a lecturer in Communication Technology at the University of Leeds, told the New Scientist that Norway's geography made analogue radio transmission particularly difficult. He said: "Norway has many mountains and valleys that the robust nature of DAB can help with. "Additionally, its FM radio infrastructure was coming to the end of its life, so they would've needed to either replace it or fully commit to DAB anyway.

A huge telescope in Chile is going to be modified so that it can look for aliens. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope will be altered so that it can better look for potentially habitable and habited planets in Alpha Centauri, the star system that is closest to Earth. The modifications are part of a deal between the ESO and Breakthrough Starshot, a huge venture that eventually hopes to send out tiny spacecraft deep into space, among other projects. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station.

The rise of cloud-based multinational entities (MNE's) like Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. has proven that far from being a passing fad, virtual and cloud-based businesses have come to stay creating a new frontier for both tax regulators and departments. Global tax laws have however, failed to keep pace with the fast-paced evolution in the tech world creating challenges for tax assessors and departments as they race to determine, plan for, as well as comply with new standards. While uncertainties persisted, loopholes were exploited mainly in the knotty area of Transfer Pricing (TP). Increasingly improving tax audit procedures have made the area of TP potential minefield for multinational companies not just regarding compliance with overall tax rules but also, regarding its tax planning activities. Multinationals like GOOGLE, Amazon and Microsoft, have fallen foul of new regulations with costs ranging from a couple of millions to billions of dollars.

Multiple weaknesses were exposed in public institutions in connection with last year's election. First, cybercriminals tried to hack the outcome, then pollsters failed to read voter sentiment accurately. Finally, fake news crept into our news feeds, distorting our collective view of the real world. Can big data technology and artificial intelligence put us back on the straight and narrow? We'll soon get to find out.

The McDonald's on the corner of Third Avenue and 58th Street in New York City doesn't look all that different from any of the fast-food chain's other locations across the country. Inside, however, hungry patrons are welcomed not by a cashier waiting to take their order, but by a "Create Your Taste" kiosk – an automated touch-screen system that allows customers to create their own burgers without interacting with another human being. It's impossible to say exactly how many jobs have been lost by the deployment of the automated kiosks – McDonald's has been predictably reluctant to release numbers – but such innovations will be an increasingly familiar sight in Trump's America. Once confined to the pages of futuristic dystopian fictions, the field of robotics promises to be the most profoundly disruptive technological shift since the industrial revolution. While robots have been utilized in several industries, including the automotive and manufacturing sectors, for decades, experts now predict that a tipping point in robotic deployments is imminent – and that much of the developed world simply isn't prepared for such a radical transition.

FILE - In this Nov. 21, 2016 file photo, Transportation Secretary-designate Elaine Chao arrives at Trump Tower in New York. Chao is facing questions from senators seeking insights into how the Trump administration plans to implement the president-elect's promise to generate $1 trillion in infrastructure spending and to regulate self-driving cars and drones, among other concerns.

Though artificial intelligence experts may cringe at the portrayals of humanlike AI in science fiction, some researchers are nudging us closer to those visions. "I think it's useful that your user interface not only understand your emotions, your personality, your tone, your motivations, but that it also have a set of emotions, personality, motivations," says Rob High, the CTO of IBM Watson. "I think that makes it more natural for us." Last month, High's company unveiled Project Intu, an experimental platform that allows developers the ability to build internet of things devices using its artificial intelligence services, like Conversation, Language and Visual Recognition. Someday, the system promises to let programmers create a staple character of sci-fi: the gregarious, hyper-connected AI like J.A.R.V.I.S. of Iron Man, KITT of Knight Rider, or Star Wars' C3PO.