Tech visionaries may tantalize us with visions of instant gratification via drone delivery, but Silicon Valley has yet to deliver on such promises. Meanwhile, halfway around the globe in an African country barely the size of Maryland, drone deliveries have already taken flight--with more serious cargo than burritos. Jeremy Hsu is a science and tech journalist based in New York. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter. In October 2016, Rwandan crowds cheered the launch and landing of delivery drones developed and operated by Zipline, a San Francisco-based startup.

It's been nearly a year and a half since Joshua Brown became the first person to die in a car driving itself. In May 2016, Brown was on a Florida highway in his Tesla Model S using Autopilot, the semi-autonomous driver assist feature that handles steering and speed during highway driving. Tesla has always warned drivers that Autopilot isn't perfect. According to car's driving manual and the disclaimer drivers accept before they can engage it, the system should only have been used on highways with clear lane markings, strict medians, and exit and entrance ramps. So when a tractor trailer turning left crossed into the Model S's lane, the system did not recognize it--and the car crashed into its side, killing Brown instantly.

Takes a seed word from the corpus(data), check all the tweets if that seed is in it, if it is adds weights to words around tweet depending how close uses those weights to generate sentence. Nothing special, im looking at implementing a more intelligent language model, make it more human like and not a bunch of crap, also need to do some text processing cause lots of crap in it.

Self-Driving laws for both individuals and businesses were passed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) on Tuesday. According to NHTSA, 94 percent of serious car accidents occur due to human error. The new guidelines are expected to also support the transition from semi-autonomous cars to fully autonomous ones. Self-driving cars range from Level 1 - semi-autonomous to Level 5 - fully autonomous cars. "The new Guidance supports further development of this important new technology, which has the potential to change the way we travel and how we deliver goods and services. The safe deployment of automated vehicle technologies means we can look forward to a future with fewer traffic fatalities and increased mobility for all Americans," said U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao in a statement on the NHTSA website.

Like a scene out of The Terminator, the future of warfare is destined to include robot soldiers, unmanned aerial assault, and self-driving, weaponized vehicles. An $11 million contract approved by the Pentagon has been awarded to Six3 Advanced Systems. The US Department of Defense is calling on Six3 to "design, develop, and validate system prototypes for a combined-arms squad." By the year 2025, experts predict that the U.S. military will have more robot soldiers than humans. According to the U.S. Department of Defense directive, the new American fighting squad is meant to combine "humans and unmanned assets, ubiquitous communications and information, and advanced capabilities in all domains to maximize squad performance in increasingly complex operational environments."

Beyond its use in political campaigns, the actual uses of AI in government range from completing various bureaucratic tasks that are able to be automated, to actual political roles. AI may be able to automate various public sector jobs from sanitation to public transport to data entry. Deloitte released an article discussing this exact possibility and attempted to quantify the actual money and time savings this could provide to the public sector. It is likely that automation can provide many benefits to the public sector, but the question is if it will be allowed to. Although AI may be a cheaper and more efficient choice in the long run, there will probably not be too many politicians that want to be directly tied to automating jobs, which this would undoubtedly do.

The cybersecurity skills shortage is common knowledge. But while it's true that companies face significant competition to land qualified security employees, it's myopic to argue there's not enough talent out there. To say there's a dearth of security talent suggests that organizations aren't responsible for shortcomings in security hiring practices. The fact is, companies aren't doing enough to strategically cultivate security talent. As the need for security roles expands, organizations across industries will face growing pressure to hire qualified security professionals. With the bottom line of many businesses hinging on their ability to effectively oversee cybersecurity, companies should consider turning to intelligent solutions to augment the process.

As we head deeper into the 21st century, we're starting to catch a glimpse of the fantastic technological possibilities that await. But we're also starting to get a grim sense of the potential horrors. Here are 10 frightening technologies that should never, ever, come into existence. As I was putting this list together, it became obvious to me that many of the technologies described below could be put to tremendously good use. It was important, therefore, for me to make the distinction between a technology per se and how it might be put to ill use. Once developed, it could be used to end scarcity, clean-up the environment, and rework human biology.

An infamous intelligent robot that escaped from his lab twice has shaken hands with Vladimir Putin. The Russian president was touring an IT exhibition in Perm, which is becoming known as the country's Silicon Valley, when he met Promobot. The big-eyed, Russian-made machine is said to have immediately recognised Putin and enthusiastically introduced himself with a handshake. Promobot is used as a guide, model and promotional salesman across Russia and keeps a database of prominent public figures. However, the android has hit the headlines in the last year for his escape attempts.

Engineering giant Rolls-Royce plans to make an autonomous navy ship, powered by artificial intelligence, sophisticated sensors and advanced propulsion, for sale to militaries throughout the world. The British company, known for its aircraft engines and luxury automotive heritage, revealed a concept version of the naval vessel in multiple photos released Tuesday. Amid increasing concern among some technologists about the prospect of self-aware artificial intelligence systems becoming a threat to humanity, Rolls-Royce said it was already conducting "significant analysis of potential cyber risks" to "ensure end-to-end security." With range of 3,500 nautical miles, the 60-meter-long Rolls-Royce vessel would be able to operate on its own without human intervention for more than 100 days. Its missions could include patrol and surveillance, fleet watch or sea mine detection.