Facebook has been forced to end a hugely controversial data sharing agreement with WhatsApp. The decision would have seen WhatsApp hand out information on all of its users to Facebook, letting the latter use data about people's chats to inform its advertising. It would also have gone the other way – allowing companies to send WhatsApp's to people based on things they've bought on Facebook, for instance. But now the UK's Information Commissioner's Office has told the company that it needs to bring that arrangement to an end because it does not have "valid consent" from its users. Facebook had looked to gain permission from its users to have their data used as part of the deal.

Is that you, HAL? AI can now see secrets through lipreading – kinda Tend.ai raises $2M for robot arms that operate multiple 3D printers and workshop machines Why it's so hard to create unbiased artificial intelligence Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

The world is going to be a very different place in 2045. Predicting the future is fraught with challenges, but when it comes to technological advances and forward thinking, experts working at the Pentagon's research agency may be the best people to ask. Launched in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is behind some of the biggest innovations in the military -- many of which have crossed over to the civilian technology market. These include things like advanced robotics, global-positioning systems, and the internet. It's pretty likely that robots and artificial technology are going to transform a bunch of industries, drone aircraft will continue their leap from the military to the civilian market, and self-driving cars will make your commute a lot more bearable.

To better understand ISIS drones, I spoke with an investigator at Conflict Armament research, who requested anonymity given the sensitive nature of the work. When the investigator entered the workshop, there were no completed drones inside. Instead, they saw plywood fuselages and styrofoam wings, as well as a missile from a man-portable anti-air defense system, or MANPADS. "For us it implied that they were trying to arm it, arm their drones with something that would be light enough to be carried by a drone, but also that would have the right kind of explosives for potency," they said. Many of their finding were published in a report on the Islamic State's Weaponized Drones.

Zoltan Istvan was in town recently, campaigning as the Presidential nominee of the Transhumanist Party. He was on track to appear on the ballot in zero states. "Politicians keep having the same old arguments about tax policy and Social Security," he said. "Transhumanists want to talk about how science can help us radically transform the human experience, how we can cure death and disease and upload our consciousness into the cloud, things like that." He was on a street corner in SoHo.

Military scientists in the US have revealed a series of experiments designs to create'supersoldiers' with enhanced mental capabilities. The successful tests used electrical brain stimulators to enhance the mental skills of soldiers. It is hoped the research could lead to treatments for drone operators, air crews and others in demanding roles. The successful tests at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio used electrical brain stimulators to enhance the mental skills of soldiers. It is hoped the research could lead to treatments for drone operators, air crews and others in demanding roles.

Social psychologists have long known that humans make snap judgments about each other based on nothing more than the way we look and, in particular, our faces. We use these judgments to determine whether a new acquaintance is trustworthy or clever or dominant or sociable or humorous and so on. These decisions may or may not be right and are by no means objective, but they are consistent. Given the same face in the same conditions, people tend to judge it in the same way. And that raises an interesting possibility.

Ben Dickson is a software engineer and the founder of TechTalks. As artificial intelligence and machine learning mature and manifest their potential to take on complicated tasks, we've become somewhat expectant that robots can succeed where humans have failed -- namely, in putting aside personal biases when making decisions. But as recent cases have shown, like all disruptive technologies, machine learning introduces its own set of unexpected challenges and sometimes yields results that are wrong, unsavory, offensive and not aligned with the moral and ethical standards of human society. While some of these stories might sound amusing, they do lead us to ponder the implications of a future where robots and artificial intelligence take on more critical responsibilities and will have to be held responsible for the possibly wrong decisions they make. At its core, machine learning uses algorithms to parse data, extract patterns, learn and make predictions and decisions based on the gleaned insights.

Facebook has been forced to end a hugely controversial data sharing agreement with WhatsApp. The decision would have seen WhatsApp hand out information on all of its users to Facebook, letting the latter use data about people's chats to inform its advertising. It would also have gone the other way – allowing companies to send WhatsApp's to people based on things they've bought on Facebook, for instance. But now the UK's Information Commissioner's Office has told the company that it needs to bring that arrangement to an end because it does not have "valid consent" from its users. Facebook had looked to gain permission from its users to have their data used as part of the deal.

Media reports say an artificial intelligence (AI) system called MogIA, developed by Sanjiv Rai, an innovator based in Mumbai, has predicted that Donald Trump will win Tuesday's presidential elections in the United States. Unveiled in 2004, the system apparently got it right in the last three presidential elections. It also predicted that Trump and Hillary Clinton will be the nominees of the Republican and Democratic Parties respectively. Rai is quoted as saying that the algorithm got even better as it has "learnt" from the last few rounds. MogIA is named after Mowgli from The Jungle Book.