This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. When it comes to new technologies and products, we tend to think of "digital" as synonymous with advanced, modern, and high-def, while "analog" is considered retrograde, outmoded, and low-resolution. But if you think analog is dead, you'd be wrong. Analog processing not only remains at the heart of many vital systems we depend on today, it is now going to make its way into a new breed of compute and intelligent systems that will power some of the most exciting technologies of the future: artificial intelligence and robotics.

According to Elon Musk, driverless car technology is a problem that's pretty much solved -- the regulators just need to catch up. And they might want to start moving faster, because Musk isn't slowing down. The chief executive of electric car maker Tesla said Wednesday that all the cars the company produces going forward will be equipped with the hardware needed to transform them into self-driving cars, as soon as the software and road rules are ready. On Thursday, the company posted a video with a Rolling Stones soundtrack that shows a Tesla Model S driving itself around highways and streets in Silicon Valley, pulling into a Tesla parking lot, searching for a spot and parking itself. It even spins its front wheels to the left so the passenger-side tire properly kisses the curb.

A rainbow flag flies with the Union flag above British Cabinet Offices. Thousands of gay and bisexual men convicted under Britain's now-defunct sexual offense laws will be posthumously pardoned. The Ministry of Justice announced the proposed amendment Thursday that would posthumously pardon thousands convicted under those outdated laws. The so-called "Turing's Law" would also allow those who are living to apply to have their names removed from criminal records. Lord John Sharkey, the man behind the amendment, called the development "momentous" and said that of the 65,000 men convicted under the laws, 15,000 are still alive, BBC reported.

John Bassett, a British spy who worked for the agency GCHQ for nearly two decades, has told Daily Express that the U.S. was considering plans to employ thousands of robots by 2025. At a meeting with police and counter-terrorism officials in London, he said: "At some point around 2025 or thereabouts the U.S. army will actually have more combat robots than it will have human soldiers. Many of those combat robots are trucks that can drive themselves, and they will get better at not falling off cliffs. But some of them are rather more exciting than trucks. So we will see in the West combat robots outnumber human soldiers."

This article is part of an MIT SMR initiative exploring how technology is reshaping the practice of management. The paradox of automation: Earlier this year, Facebook exorcised those pesky human editors who were introducing political bias into its Trending news list and left the job to algorithms. Now, reports Caitlin Dewey in The Washington Post, the Trending news isn't biased, but some of it is fake. Turns out the algorithms can't tell a real news story from a hoax. Facebook says it can improve its algorithms, but errors of judgment aren't the only pitfall in transferring human tasks to machines.

The people who study artificial intelligence for a living say the technology should not make us fear for our lives. This is the gist of the first in a series of reports from a Stanford University team about the effect AI will have over the next century. "The frightening, futurist portrayals of Artificial Intelligence that dominate films and novels, and shape the popular imagination," the report reads, "are fictional." The report focused on how AI might affect the typical American city in 2030. The most sweeping changes laid out were on the transportation front, as self-driving cars are expected to become more commonplace.

The UK government's plans to check whether people are old enough to watch pornography might include creating a database of everyone's viewing habits. The Government has recently been looking to introduce new checks to ensure that adult content can only be viewed by those over 18. To do that, it will introduce age verification schemes, and sites that don't implement them will be rendered inaccessible from within the UK. But the mechanism involved in doing so could create an entire database of the UK's porn viewing habits, according to the Open Rights Group. Doing so will create a vulnerable set of information that could expose anyone, according to the group. The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight.

Google and a cadre of automakers are not happy about the state of California's proposed rules for autonomous vehicles, which they say would severely slow their progress towards a self-driving future. Although the state legislature approved autonomous trials last month, the group objected to the state's decision to require certain regulations that the federal government made voluntary it its own policy. The group of tech and car companies protesting the regulations includes General Motors, Volkswagen, Honda and Ford, as well as the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, which counts Google, Lyft, Uber and Volvo among its members. According to Reuters, the group laid out its concerns during a hearing in Sacramento this week and mainly objected to the state's decision to require a new autonomous vehicle data recorder. They also objected to giving police the ability to request self-driving data without a warrant or a subpoena, and a separate proposal that they claim would force them to wait an entire year between testing a new vehicle and getting it rolling on public streets.

New presidents typically move into the White House neither expecting to spend much time on scientific issues, nor prepared to. But history shows that, ready or not, every president ends up grappling with a host of science-related policy issues or crises. Climate change is sure to loom large, as will the annual debates over how much the government should spend on basic research and help industry commercialize new discoveries. Technological advances, from self-driving cars to new genetic-engineering techniques, will pose new regulatory challenges. And there are likely to be unplanned events, such as disease outbreaks, oil spills, and natural disasters.

The findings suggest that about a quarter of all police departments in the US have access to face recognition technology. That police are using face recognition technology is not a problem in itself. In a world with a camera in every pocket, they would be daft not to. But face recognition can be used far more broadly than fingerprint recognition, which means it carries a higher risk of tagging innocent people. Fingerprints are difficult to work with.