Fifty civil rights groups have signed a letter asking the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate police use of facial-recognition databases following a report that half of America's adults have their images stored in at least one searchable facial-recognition database used by local, state and federal authorities They argue the technology disproportionately affects minorities and has minimal oversight. Researchers even found The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office in Arizona has enrolled all of Honduras' driver's licenses and mug shots into its database. States in dark blue use drivers license photos in police facial recognition databases. Red dots represent other jurisdictions using facial recognition. Of the 52 agencies that acknowledged using face recognition, only one obtained legislative approval for its use and only one agency provided evidence that it audited officers' face recognition searches for misuse. Not one agency required warrants, and many agencies did not even require an officer to suspect someone of committing a crime before using face recognition to identify her.

Why is it that every time humans develop a really clever computer system in the movies, it seems intent on killing every last one of us at its first opportunity? In Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 starts off as an attentive, if somewhat creepy, custodian of the astronauts aboard the USS Discovery One, before famously turning homicidal and trying to kill them all. In The Matrix, humanity's invention of AI promptly results in human-machine warfare, leading to humans enslaved as a biological source of energy by the machines. In Daniel H. Wilson's book Robopocalypse, computer scientists finally crack the code on the AI problem, only to have their creation develop a sudden and deep dislike for its creators. Is Siri just a few upgrades away from killing you in your sleep? And you're not an especially sentient being yourself if you haven't heard the story of Skynet (see The Terminator, T2, T3, etc.) The simple answer is that -- movies like Wall-E, Short Circuit, and Chappie, notwithstanding -- Hollywood knows that nothing guarantees box office gold quite like an existential threat to all of humanity. Whether that threat is likely in real life or not is decidedly beside the point. How else can one explain the endless march of zombie flicks, not to mention those pesky, shark-infested tornadoes? The reality of AI is nothing like the movies. Siri, Alexa, Watson, Cortana -- these are our HAL 9000s, and none seems even vaguely murderous. The technology has taken leaps and bounds in the last decade, and seems poised to finally match the vision our artists have depicted in film for decades. Is Siri just a few upgrades away from killing you in your sleep, or is Hollywood running away with a tired idea? Looking back at the last decade of AI research helps to paint a clearer picture of a sometimes frightening, sometimes enlightened future. An increasing number of prominent voices are being raised about the real dangers of humanity's continuing work on so-called artificial intelligence.

It's no secret that American law has been building facial recognition databases to aide in its investigations. But a new, comprehensive report on the status of facial recognition as a tool in law enforcement shows the sheer scope and reach of the FBI's database of faces and those of state-level law enforcement agencies: Roughly half of American adults are included in those collections. And that massive assembly of biometric data is accessed with only spotty oversight of its accuracy and how it's used and searched. The 150-page report, released on Tuesday by the Center for Privacy & Technology at the Georgetown University law school, found that law enforcement databases now include the facial recognition information of 117 million Americans, about one in two U.S. adults. It goes on to outline the dangers to privacy, free speech, and protections against unreasonable search and seizure that come from unchecked use of that information.

Microsoft has made a major breakthrough in speech recognition, creating a technology that recognizes the words in a conversation as well as a person does. In a paper published Monday, a team of researchers and engineers in Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research reported a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists. The researchers reported a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 percent, down from the 6.3 percent WER the team reported just last month. The 5.9 percent error rate is about equal to that of people who were asked to transcribe the same conversation, and it's the lowest ever recorded against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task. "We've reached human parity," said Xuedong Huang, the company's chief speech scientist.

Highly maneuverable and silent, this miniature robotic tank, built at the Degtyarev Plant in Kovrov, will sneak up on its target totally unnoticed and take the enemy by surprise. "The Nerekhta system has been put on the list of future fighting robots currently being mulled for use by the Russian Armed Forces, a Defense Ministry official told the newspaper. "If the combat platform passes the tests, it will enter service with our army scouts and Special Ops troops." The Nerekhta is built around a light armored rubber-track platform and looks like a miniature tank where the turret is replaced with an explosives-packed container. Weighing 300 kilograms and just over one meter long, the Nerekhta can haul hundreds of kilograms of high explosives at 11 km/h in a silent mode. Before it goes into combat a map of the the battlefield with the coordinates of the designated targets is downloaded to its onboard computer. All its operators need to do is just push a button clicking the number of the downloaded targets and leave the rest to this powerful tank. Receiving the radio command, the Nerekhta will plot its course to the target, approach it and blow it up. This is exactly what the Nerekhta did when it was unveiled to the public during the Army-2016 expo outside Moscow. "A robotic arm will eventually be added on to make the Nerekhta reusable.

The idea of falling in love with a robot is not currently accepted in any society in the world--most likely because robots are regarded as nonliving objects. But as AI evolves, it has the potential to surpass human intelligence, so, at some point, robots may not be perceived as objects anymore, but as equivalent to humans. Many of the companies developing companion robots design them with humanlike functionality, such as the ability to identify their owner's feelings and to evolve their knowledge based on their owner's lifestyle and preferences. The ultimate goal is to ensure the human is happy and satisfied. In this report, we examine how technological advancements could revolutionize relationships and love between human beings and robots.

From the outside, the single-engine Cessna Caravan that took off from a small airport here on Monday looked unremarkable. But inside the cockpit, in the right seat, a robot with spindly metal tubes and rods for arms and legs and a claw hand grasping the throttle, was doing the flying. In the left seat, a human pilot tapped commands to his mute colleague using an electronic tablet. The demonstration was part of a government and industry collaboration that is attempting to replace the second human pilot in two-person flight crews with robot co-pilots that never tire, get bored, feel stressed out or become distracted. The program's leaders even envision a day when planes and helicopters, large and small, will fly people and cargo without any human pilot on board.

Ask not what the government can do for Silicon Valley; ask what Silicon Valley can do for the government. He presented WIRED with six challenges he feels the tech industry needs to address--just a few earthshaking problems the country could use some help with, that's all. We reached out to six of the biggest names in the WIRED world, and we gave each of them a challenge from the president's list. Then we asked: To get this done, what's the industry's best play? Silicon Valley runs on stories. So does the economy in general. We create what we believe in. If we believe we can use technology to identify and solve big problems, then that's what we'll do.

Yesterday, a turboprop plane took off from a small airport in Virginia that from the outside, looked fairly unremarkable. But inside the cockpit, in the right seat, a robot with spindly metal tubes and rods for arms and legs and a claw hand grasping the throttle, was doing the flying. The demonstration was part of a government and industry collaboration that is attempting to replace the second human pilot in two-person flight crews with robot co-pilots that never tire, get bored, feel stressed out or become distracted. The Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS) project envisions a day when planes and helicopters, large and small, will fly people and cargo without any human pilot on board. For example, an array of cameras allows the robot to see all the cockpit instruments and read the gauges.

The vision of the so-called internet of things -- giving all sorts of physical things a digital makeover -- has been years ahead of reality. But that gap is closing fast. Today, the range of things being computerized and connected to networks is stunning, from watches, appliances and clothing to cars, jet engines and factory equipment. Even roadways and farm fields are being upgraded with digital sensors. In the last two years, the number of internet-of-things devices in the world has surged nearly 70 percent to 6.4 billion, according to Gartner, a research firm.