Today on In Case You Missed It: The US Air Force is moving its Space Surveillance Telescope to Australia to track space junk littering geosynchronous orbit. That's the orbit 22,000 miles away from our planet where satellites mirror the Earth's rotation so that they don't appear to move. The Department of Justice story about facial recognition is here, while that darling sneezing baby (who eschews costumes) is here. If you enjoy the cartoon humor that is an engine giving up on a job, that's here. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.

With the vital exception of venture capitalist Peter Thiel, tomorrow-focused Silicon Valley tends to see Donald Trump as the candidate of yesterday. Tech workers are demonstrably less than fans of the Republican presidential nominee. Among the many issues at which they find themselves at odds, the real estate/media maven's approach to automation is anathema to the Valley as autonomous cars speed ever closer. "You have a potential candidate in Trump where his entire rhetoric is, 'We're going to bring back all those old jobs, we're not going to go into the future,'" Aaron Levie, CEO and founder of Box, said this week at Vanity Fair's New Establishment Summit in San Francisco. Levie's right: Trump's promise to "bring back" 5 million factory jobs spirited away overseas has been an vital tenet of his campaign.

Last Thursday, I had the honor to be one of the warmup acts for President Obama at the White House Frontiers Conference at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Here is the prepared text and slides from the talk I delivered there. As you'll see if you watch the video, what I ended up saying isn't exactly what I had written out in advance, but it is reasonably close. Let me know if you like this format for sharing talks.) Hearing that Bob Dylan just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, how could I not begin this talk with his famous line, "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"

In the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in a corner of South Carolina sits a town that should be economically dead. For decades, Greenville was the heart of the state's textile industry--and its economic engine. First attracted by the area's fast-moving rivers as a way to power looms, textile manufacturers employed tens of thousands of people here. Beginning in the 1970s, however, facing competition from lower-cost manufacturing regions like Mexico and Southeast Asia, these companies began to struggle. Over the next decades, many factories closed.

It's no secret that President Obama is a blerd--a big-time sci-fi buff and a huge proponent of advancing STEM. He just served as guest editor of popular geek'zine Wired's November issue. President Obama launched a number of STEM-related initiatives and at his most recent event, the White House Frontiers Conference, revealed specifics on how the United States will push technology and innovation. At the conference, held in Pittsburgh last week, the Obama administration announced that 300 million would go toward science, technology, and innovation. The investment is "to develop the industries of the future and harness science and technology to help address important challenges," according to a press release issued by The White House.

Speaking to robots, asking the Google Assistant for directions, using Amazon Alexa to lock the front door. Those things reveal the current state of artificial intelligence--a human powered endeavor with some assistance. Soon, it will all seem like the Dark Ages. Tesla has decided to radically improve how A.I. automates our lives. Announced late last night during the Presidential debates, the new Enhanced Autopilot will work in future cars in the Tesla line-up, depending on regulatory approval.

In May, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced "a new series of workshops and an interagency working group to learn more about the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence." They hosted a June Workshop on Safety and Control for AI (videos), along with three other workshops, and issued a general request for information on AI (see MIRI's primary submission here). The OSTP has now released a report summarizing its conclusions, "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence," and the result is very promising. The OSTP acknowledges the ongoing discussion about AI risk, and recommends "investing in research on longer-term capabilities and how their challenges might be managed": General AI (sometimes called Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI) refers to a notional future AI system that exhibits apparently intelligent behavior at least as advanced as a person across the full range of cognitive tasks. A broad chasm seems to separate today's Narrow AI from the much more difficult challenge of General AI. Attempts to reach General AI by expanding Narrow AI solutions have made little headway over many decades of research.

Government-funded artificial intelligence programs could soon be organized under a new effort by the General Services Administration. GSA earlier this month created the Data Federation, a site that intends to coordinate the disparate existing data-related efforts at various agencies by sharing standards, case studies and reusable tech tools. On Monday, GSA plans to announce a new community of practice, or subsection dedicated to artificial intelligence, according to Technology Transformation Service data portfolio lead Philip Ashlock. Ashlock was speaking at a Digital Government Institute conference on Thursday. The Data Federation is still in the very early stages, he said--long term, it's working with 18F and the Presidential Innovation Fellows program to develop a "maturity model" to understand how data projects tend to evolve.

From driverless cars to online financial infrastructure payments, Artificial Intelligence obviously will be the heart of the next industrial revolution. The wave of globalisation and democracy cannot be overlooked regarding their contributions steering policy integration. Both concepts will play vital roles towards integrating the African continent under an umbrella perceived to end humanity (Artificial Intelligence). The rise of machines and robotics in high-income economies has been a contested discourse by philosophers, economists, tech geeks and policy makers. There is a rising belief it would steal jobs and render humanity useless and even economists seem not to be certain about the relevance of labour in this period. Immediately Japan was announced as the host of 2020 Olympics, what would strike one's mind is the presence of robotics during the famous sporting event.

Larger data sets and faster computers have enabled a recent flurry of progress--and investment--in artificial intelligence. David Cox of Harvard thinks the next big jump will depend on understanding what happens inside the head of a rat when it plays video games. Cox leads a 28 million project called Ariadne, funded by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, that is looking for clues in mammalian brains to make software smarter. "This is a huge, moonshot-like effort to go into the brain and see what clues and tricks are hiding there for us to find," he said today at EmTech MIT 2016. Recent progress in tasks such as image recognition and translation sprang from putting more computing power behind a technique known as deep learning, which is loosely inspired by neuroscience.