Over a month ago, the White House released a report exploring AI's promises and challenges. Today, climate change denier and Senator Ted Cruz, head of the Senate's Space, Science and Competitiveness subcommittee, held a public hearing to follow up on the subject. He and members of the Senate's greater Commerce, Science and Transportation committee petitioned four prominent experts in the field to give a status update on artificial intelligence. Their message was clear: AI has a lot of potential to boost American production, but unless we educate far more experts, US research will be overtaken by China, India and other nations that are increasingly investing in the field. The hearing's only pleasant surprise was its bipartisan support.

Despite steady progress in detection and treatment in recent decades, cancer remains the second leading cause of death in the United States, cutting short the lives of approximately 500,000 people each year. To better understand and combat this disease, medical researchers rely on cancer registry programs--a national network of organizations that systematically collect demographic and clinical information related to the diagnosis, treatment, and history of cancer incidence in the United States. The surveillance effort, coordinated by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, enables researchers and clinicians to monitor cancer cases at the national, state, and local levels. Much of this data is drawn from electronic, text-based clinical reports that must be manually curated--a time-intensive process--before it can be used in research. For example, cancer pathology reports, text documents that describe cancerous tissue in detail, must be individually read and annotated by experts before becoming part of a cancer registry.

Do you know that many of the artificially-intelligent things we use in our everyday, quotidian lives "learned" how to "think" to varying degrees by studying the emails of some of the most craven and degraded capitalists in our deeply weird corporate history? Brooklyn's Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain have a new piece of internet art out called The Good Life (Enron Simulator). We first told you about it back in August, right after it won a Rhizome Net Art Microgrant. You input your email into a very Windows 95-looking website and the site sends you each of the 500,000 publicly-available emails from the Enron archives in the order they were sent. You can choose to receive these emails over the course of seven days, 30 days, one year or seven years. Depending on your choice, you'll receive somewhere between 100,000 and 196 emails per day.

Pokeman Go has been a raging success. But its launch was marred by frequent downtimes and dropped connections. In a recent chat at the Google Cloud Platform Next Conference, Niantic CTO Phil Keslin talked about the "hair on fire" experience where the team had to firefight and upgrade key components on the live production system in order to handle the unexpected surge in new users joining in. Among the various upgrades made to the system, Niantic had to replace the network load balancer with a much more sophisticated HTTP/S load balancing system that could handle a larger overall throughput and offer faster connections. Keslin says that this timely upgrade made it possible for his team to launch in Japan without an incident although the number of new user signups at this point was triple what it was during their earlier US launch.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. In July, the Food and Drug Administration issued guidance on three topics important to the future of medical innovation. These welcome guidelines demonstrate the FDA is doing the best it can to ensure it does not interfere inappropriately with advances in medical technology that rely on processing information.

The federal government's highway safety agency agrees with Google: Computers that will control the cars of the future can be considered their driver. The redefinition of "driver" is an important break for Google. Companies like Visteon (NYSE: VC), which makes infotainment systems and connected car solutions, is already working with leading automakers like Ford, Mazda, Renault/Nissan, GM, Jaguar Land Rover, Honda, BMW, Daimler, PSA and Volkswagen. The company is working on making it easier for automakers to update apps in cars but also add a layer of cyber security to the infotainment system. More apps in cars mean more cybersecurity threats.

Infrastructure investment is on the forefront of political agendas around the world. From the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) spearheaded by China to the pro-infrastructure themes that united an otherwise divisive presidential campaign in the United States, the policy focus is on transportation, telecommunications, utilities and so on around us. The expected surge in such infrastructure projects is estimated to fill a gap of $8 trillion across Asia alone, and around $1 trillion in the U.S. But this policy spotlight must also now be lifted above us to outer space, where newspace industries are building, extending and connecting a space-based infrastructure to the planet as never before. Newspace is taking it another step forward, transforming the prospects for the economics, societal and national security domains.

According to a set of intelligent humans interviewed for this story, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are going to help drive the tech economy in 2017. When CIO.com posted a query on Help a Reporter Out, a site designed to help journalists connect with sources, asking about startup trends to watch in 2017, the overwhelming majority of respondents pointed to AI. This coming year and beyond, AI will help companies "disrupt sectors that haven't been fully disrupted," says Anthony Glomski, principal of AG Asset Advisory, a financial advisory firm. "AI is in its beginning stages with massive potential impact." Here are eight startup categories and trends experts believe will be big in 2017.

Robotic weapons have become so advanced that top military experts in the US fear the plot of the sci-fi film'Terminator' could come true. Huge technological leaps forward in drones, artificial intelligence and autonomous weapon systems must be addressed before humanity is driven to extinction by mechanical overlords like in the 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger classic, according to Pentagon chiefs. Air Force General Paul Selva, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the US Defense Department, said so-called thinking weapons could lead to: "Robotic systems to do lethal harm... a Terminator without a conscience." When asked about robotic weapons able to make their own decisions, he said: "Our job is to defeat the enemy" but "it is governed by law and by convention." He says the military insists on keeping humans in the decision-making process to "inflict violence on the enemy". "That ethical boundary is the one we've draw a pretty fine line on.

COLUMBUS, OHIO – A Somali-born student who carried out a car-and-knife attack at Ohio State University might have been inspired by the Islamic State group and a former al-Qaida leader, investigators said Wednesday. Law enforcement officials said that it's too soon to say the rampage that hurt 11 people on Monday was terrorism. They said they aren't aware of any direct contact between the Islamic State group and the attacker, Ohio State student Abdul Razak Ali Artan. "We only believe he may have been inspired" by the group, said Angela Byers, the top FBI agent overseeing federal investigations in the southern half of Ohio. Artan also might have been influenced by Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric who took a leadership role in al-Qaida before being killed in a 2011 U.S. drone strike in Yemen, Byers said.