Driverless cars are set to improve, disrupt, and challenge the way we travel--someday. As of now, self-driving cars aren't available for widespread use, as they aren't sufficiently developed or safe to be commercially sold. It may take decades before they are able to infiltrate the market or gain enough public acceptance to be successful. Seth Birnbaum is CEO of EverQuote, the largest online auto insurance marketplace in the US. Even though autonomous vehicles haven't gone mainstream, US government regulators published their automated vehicle policy in September, and many states are working to develop regulations for autonomous cars.

Politicians have exempted themselves from Britain's new wide-ranging spying laws. The Investigatory Powers Act, which has just passed into law, brings some of the most extreme and invasive surveillance powers ever given to spies in a democratic state. But protections against those spying powers have been given to MPs. Most of the strongest powers in the new law require that those using them must be given a warrant. That applies to people wanting to see someone's full internet browsing history, for instance, which is one of the things that will be collected under the new law.

The release of the game Battlefield 1 last month illustrates how video games contribute to this creeping unreality. The first-person shooter is set in World War I. All wars are horrors, but this particular war, the founding trauma of the 20th century, is widely regarded as nothing else. The Great War is known 100 years later for three things: its pointlessness, its lethality (57,000 British soldiers died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme alone), and the grueling trench warfare on the western front. Battlefield 1's producer, EA DICE, takes pains to acknowledge the unrelenting bleakness of the war, presenting the game's thinly drawn characters as average people caught up in tragic global events and left haunted by them.

WASHINGTON - U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, will convene a hearing on Wednesday, November 30, 2016, at 2:30 p.m. on "The Dawn of Artificial Intelligence." The hearing will conduct a broad overview of the state of artificial intelligence, including policy implications and effects on commerce. On October 12, 2016, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a report entitled, Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence. The report outlined opportunities for artificial intelligence, including recommendations on how the technology can be used to advance social good and improve government operations. The report also proposed 23 policy recommendations and a companion strategic plan that identified priorities for federally-funded research and development in artificial intelligence.

Next time you stop for gas at a self-serve pump, say hello to the robot in front of you. Its life story can tell you a lot about the robot economy roaring toward us like an EF5 tornado on the prairie. Yeah, your automated gas pump killed a lot of jobs over the years, but its biography might give you hope that the coming wave of automation driven by artificial intelligence (AI) will turn out better for almost all of us than a lot of people seem to think. The first crude version of an automated gas-delivering robot appeared in 1964 at a station in Westminster, Colorado. Short Stop convenience store owner John Roscoe bought an electric box that let a clerk inside activate any of the pumps outside. Self-serve pumps didn't catch on until the 1970s, when pump-makers added automation that let customers pay at the pump, and over the next 30 years, stations across the nation installed these task-specific robots and fired attendants. By the 2000s, the gas attendant job had all but disappeared.

Many products or published articles based on data science are heavily regulated, and illegal to perform or publish or sell without a special license, especially in US. You may be doing research and development on a topic considered as classified by the US government. Steganography (the art and science of hiding secret messages in images) Factoring the product of two large primes (cryptography application) Algorithms to reverse-engineer some systems (e.g.to check if a credit card number is valid) Distribution of encoding algorithms that can be used and customized by anyone, even offline Selling or designing home-made, backdoor-free, weapon-grade encryption products abroad or even in US Manufacturing and selling weapon-grade random numbers, for instance based on the digits of some transcendental numbers, using very fast algorithms (have you ever wondered why Excel random numbers were so poor - maybe they are very poor on purpose, not because those who designed them are ignorant) Algorithms to reverse-engineer some systems (e.g.to check if a credit card number is valid) Depending on how strong your algorithms are, it could be classified material, and you might not be aware of it until you get a letter from the NSA (after all, if you don't have access to classified information, there's no way for you to know whether what you do is classified or not). Designing algorithms, trained on data, to beat the IRS, using legal techniques only Publishing a list of prices for medical procedures (with price range), broken down per hospital, based on data collected online from patients, with their consent Gambling or bets that involve guessing econometric indicators, such as stock prices or indices. While this is different from a lottery in the sense that winning is based on good data science rather than pure luck (lottery is another business that is great for a data scientist, although universally illegal), it might still be illegal depending on your jurisdiction.

Any robot NASA sends to harsh, distant worlds has to be tougher than garden-variety machines. Since every component has to be able to withstand extreme conditions, a team of researchers over at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are looking at the possibility of using bulk metallic glass for their gears. Metallic glass is a metal with glass-like atomic structure -- it has low melting temp and can be blow-molded when heated. Gears made out of the material don't get brittle and won't need lubricants even in extremely cold environments. NASA says the Curiosity rover has to heat up lubricants every time it wants to move -- metallic glass gears could save precious energy when exploring alien worlds.

Do you need a chat with a Data Doctor? The Data landscape is vast and ever changing, it can also be a place where we are bombarded with buzzwords, new trends and an onslaught of tools and services. Your body needs a check-up every now and then, so does your data journey need a check-up too? The Data Lab are running drop-in sessions with industry experts, "Doctors", who offer practical, executable advice to attendees covering 3 of the current big themes in data. Each Doctor has nine 12-minute slots available during the day, so request your 1-2-1 slot quickly before they are fully booked out.

Google, as a search engine as well as a company, has come a tremendously long way since the days of a simple web page and a list of links. Nowadays, there's little that we don't think Google is possible of, and with their recent approach to Artificial Intelligence, the company's historic motto of "don't be evil" could be helping the whole human race in the near future. Google's AI research has focused on training these algorithms to make decisions for themselves, and speed up the process exponentially. The firm has already been training their AI to improve the quality of smaller images when enlarged, but the Google Research Blog is sharing something much more important with us this week, the idea of using AI to catch Diabetic Blindness sooner, rather than later. Diabetes is a serious condition, and while many will know about the dangers surrounding the need to amputate a foot because of the disease, few will be familiar with Diabetic retinopathy (DR), a disease which puts as many as 415 Million diabetic patients at risk of blindness all over the world.

Five findings from YouGov's European mega-survey (YouGov) Some more findings from YouGov's European mega-survey On that NYT democracy chart… Corrective 1 (Tom van der Meer) and Corrective 2 (Cas Mudde) Six charts that are key to understanding Italy's referendum (FT Data) Economists are prone to fads, and the latest is machine learning(The Economist) How to better communicate election forecasts -- in one simple chart (Monkey Cage, Washington Post) Clinton would have won if the United States looked like this(Kevin Hayes Wilson) Six charts that are key to understanding Italy's referendum (FT Data) How would you describe Fidel Castro? 'Warning Signs Are Flashing Red'(New York Times) Shift Your Point of View to When America Was "Better" (Flowing Data) How would you describe Fidel Castro? How would you describe Fidel Castro? 'Warning Signs Are Flashing Red'(New York Times) Shift Your Point of View to When America Was "Better" (Flowing Data) The OGN steering committee writes to Ben Gummer on the future of open government (Open Government Network) Where we've got to; the OGP Summit; & what's next (Open Government Network) Open Government Change We Can Believe In (Tom Cochran) Where we've got to; the OGP Summit; & what's next (Open Government Network) Why GOV.UK Verify is safer (Government Digital Service) Troubled Families and the Digital Economy Bill (Data in government) Why GOV.UK Verify is safer (Government Digital Service) Friday lunchtime lecture: Creating a web of cats (ODI) Christmas 2015 Was Filled With Hoverboards -- And Hoverboard Injuries (FiveThirtyEight) A Normal Distribution (of Legs): Etiquette and equality may be openly encroached by manspreading, but efficiency is the act's hidden victim (Walker Harrison) A Normal Distribution (of Legs): Etiquette and equality may be openly encroached by manspreading, but efficiency is the act's hidden victim (Walker Harrison) Would a different style of voting have changed the 2016 election? Would a different style of voting have changed the 2016 election?