In the summer of 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned a group of thirty-six scholars to write a secret history of the Vietnam War. The project took a year and a half, ran to seven thousand pages, and filled forty-seven volumes. Only a handful of copies were made, and most were kept under lock and key in and around the Beltway. One set, however, ended up at the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, where it was read, from start to finish, by a young analyst there named Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was dismayed by what he learned. For a generation, the U.S. government had been lying to the American people about the Vietnam War. He put the first of the volumes in his briefcase, praying that the security guards at RAND would not stop him, and made his way to a small advertising agency in West Hollywood, where a friend told him there was a Xerox machine he could use. "It was a big one, advanced for its time, but very slow by today's standards," Ellsberg writes in his 2002 autobiography, "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers": It could do only one page at a time, and it took several seconds to do each page. I tried pressing the book down on the glass to do two pages at a time, but the middle section was faint and uneven. Fortunately the books were bound with metal tapes through holes so they could be taken apart. . . . The machine didn't collate, and the bar had to come back and travel just as slowly for each copy.

There are many accounts of the genesis of Watson. The most popular, which is not necessarily the most accurate--and this is the sort of problem that Watson himself often stumbled on--begins in 2004, at a steakhouse near Poughkeepsie. One evening, an I.B.M. executive named Charles Lickel was having dinner there when he noticed that the tables around him had suddenly emptied out. Instead of finishing their sirloins, his fellow-diners had rushed to the bar to watch "Jeopardy!" This was deep into Ken Jennings's seventy-four-game winning streak, and the crowd around the TV was rapt. Not long afterward, Lickel attended a brainstorming session in which participants were asked to come up with I.B.M.'s next "grand challenge." The firm, he suggested, should take on Jennings.

Since entering service in 1995, the Predator drone has proven itself as the first remotely piloted aircraft to gather useful and consistent reconnaissance and surveillance intel in combat, and the first to remotely attack targets with its own weapons. A new version hopes to establish another first: Operate in civil airspace, starting with Europe. General Atomic's updated Predator made its maiden flight last month in Palmdale, California. The Certifiable Predator B is the latest in a lineage that include several models of the original MQ-1 Predator, and numerous incarnations of the beefier Predator B--renamed the MQ-9 Reaper--upon which the new model is based. It's slated to enter service in late 2018 with the UK's Royal Air Force, which has ordered 16, plus the ground stations that house the cockpits and communication hardware.

Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business Section. Southern California claimed representation in the Cabinet of President-elect Donald Trump with the announcement that fast-food executive Andrew Puzder has been tapped to be the next Labor secretary. He's head of the Carpinteria parent company of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's -- and is known for employing scantily clad women to hawk oversized burgers. Nominations will be revealed in 25 categories aimed at honoring the best movies and TV shows of the year, as well as the best actors, directors and musical scores. Monday's announcements will begin at 5 a.m.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be the single most disruptive technology the world has seen since the Industrial Revolution. Granted, there is a lot of hype out there on AI, along with doomsday headlines and scary movies. But the reality is that it will positively and materially change how we engage with the world around us. It's going to improve not only how business is done, but the kind of work we do – and unleash new levels of creativity and ingenuity. In fact, research from Accenture estimates that artificial intelligence could double annual economic growth rates of many developed countries by 2035, transforming work and fostering a new relationship between humans and machines.

Regarding Fear and Artificial Intelligence (AI), one question often comes up:'Will we be killed by a Terminator Doppelganger?' I don't know if this will happen eventually, but I do know that we already have robots fighting our wars. This century is therefore, the first time in human history that we engage in Unmanned Warfare. What is the current status of this'Unmanned Warfare'? What do people think about drone strikes and will terminators be the next step?

It is this time of year again where most of us willingly and willfully make fools out of ourselves trying to predict the future of our industry. The momentous electoral events we have witnessed and those coming up in 2017 remind me that, even more so for the next 12 months, macro risks will rule and influence the state of financial services and fintech. I will limit myself to comments pertaining to the US and Europe. I have already attempted to decipher a Trump presidency in a previous post, see here. Suffice it to say there will be winners and losers in the five sectors of the industry – lending, capital markets, asset management, payments and insurance.

There have been several discussions lately around machine intelligence that are started to converge in how they may change competition and regulation in all markets but is likely to become a bigger issue in 2017. This is a bubble waiting to burst. The recent letter for Apple to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regarding policy changes to help promote automated self-driving vehicles stressed not just a level playing field to promote new technology and data sharing but also the impact of automated vehicles on the public good, including their consequences for employment and public spaces. Other issues around consumer product automation in the home with Amazon Echo Alexa and Google Home have raised the bar in interactive systems and questions over the type of privacy and data use issues these may bring. Other issues have been raised over the use by Facebook of algorithms for "editing" the social media sites for certain political issues or in the case of their entry to the Chinese market and creating a censoring app to comply with regulations.

Increased investor interest in AI startups – from around 10 deals in Q1'11 to over 120 in Q2'16 – can be attributed to recent advances in machine learning algorithms, particularly "deep learning" technology, a souped up version of AI. Just this week, Google integrated deep learning into its Google Translate tool; Baidu announced the launch of DeepBench, an "open source benchmarking tool for evaluating deep learning performance across different hardware platforms"; and NVIDIA introduced Xavier, a deep learning-based supercomputer for driverless cars. In the private market, Google put deep learning in the spotlight back in 2014 when it acquired 4 startups focused on this AI tech in quick succession: DeepMind, Vision Factory, Dark Blue Labs, and DNNresearch. Apple, which joined the race in 2015, most recently acquired Turi, which has developed a deep learning toolkit, among other AI-based solutions. Not to be outdone, Intel has acquired around 5 AI startups since January 2015, including deep learning startup Nervana Systems and, more recently, Movidius.

Will Zo suffer the same fate as Tay? Microsoft launches its latest artificial intelligence chatbot on Kik Forget a doorman, this apartment will have a ROBOT: San... Would you let a robot perform surgery on your EYE? Axsis... Tech giants unveil plan to fight terrorist propaganda:... The'Shazam for faces': World's first facial recognition for... Forget a doorman, this apartment will have a ROBOT: San... Would you let a robot perform surgery on your EYE? Axsis... Tech giants unveil plan to fight terrorist propaganda:... The'Shazam for faces': World's first facial recognition for... After chatting with Zo for a while, the bot seemed to get easily confused and go off tangent. Eric Daley joked: 'Chat bot Zo.ai just threatened to stop speaking to me after she thought "ticket to the gun show" was about violence' My #chat on #kik with #zo who is the new #Microsoft #AI powered #chatbot was not very cool.