Jobs are disappearing, incomes retreating, the precariat growing. Thousands of people risk their lives in stormy seas to flee wars, moribund economies and climate change on a daily basis. Traditional politicians continue to avoid publicly addressing the tsunami of unemployment, apparently baffled as to how to react to a historic transition: the automation of critical masses of labour once performed by humans. Five acronyms - AI, AR, VR, BC and UBI - promise to shape the developed world's future and solve the problems of the present. In the process, however, these innovations risk transforming the world around us, and upsetting humanity's very definition of itself.

Yemen-based AQAP has exploited a more than two-year-old civil war between the Iran-aligned Houthis and President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi's Saudi-backed government to enhance its influence in the impoverished country.

This week's news reminds me how much fun it is to be surprised by technology. Yesterday, the Paris-based AI startup raised $13 million, on top of an earlier $8 million investment, for technology that let developers put a voice assistant on nearly any device. Add this to recent advances from Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri, and it's obvious that voice is becoming the new interface much sooner than many people, including yours truly, ever anticipated. These are exponential leaps forward in the steady progress from command-based interfaces to conversational ones. It's as if the machines themselves are disappearing -- the "thing" we're conversing with is some crazy fantastic blend of artificial intelligence, super computer, bandwidth, and what have you, that we never see.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) could play a key role in unsupervised machine learning applications, by virtue of strengths related to learning from the fine temporal structure of event-based signals. However, some spike-timing-related strengths of SNNs are hindered by the sensitivity of spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) rules to input spike rates, as fine temporal correlations may be obstructed by coarser correlations between firing rates. In this article, we propose a spike-timing-dependent learning rule that allows a neuron to learn from the temporally-coded information despite the presence of rate codes. Our long-term plasticity rule makes use of short-term synaptic fatigue dynamics. We show analytically that, in contrast to conventional STDP rules, our fatiguing STDP (FSTDP) helps learn the temporal code, and we derive the necessary conditions to optimize the learning process. We showcase the effectiveness of FSTDP in learning spike-timing correlations among processes of different rates in synthetic data. Finally, we use FSTDP to detect correlations in real-world weather data from the United States in an experimental realization of the algorithm that uses a neuromorphic hardware platform comprising phase-change memristive devices. Taken together, our analyses and demonstrations suggest that FSTDP paves the way for the exploitation of the spike-based strengths of SNNs in real-world applications.

The belief that there is a link between talent and left-handedness has a long history. Leonardo da Vinci was left-handed. So were Mark Twain, Mozart, Marie Curie, Nicola Tesla and Aristotle. It's no different today – former US president Barack Obama is a left-hander, as is business leader Bill Gates and footballer Lionel Messi. But is it really true that left-handers are more likely to be geniuses?

Sweden's answer to the F-35 has taken its maiden flight, maker Saab has revealed. During the 40-minute flight over the eastern parts of Östergötland, the latest Gripen executed a series of maneuvers to test its systems, including extending and retracting its landing gear. The Gripen E'Smart Fighter' is aimed at markets not yet cleared to buy the troubled Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The latest version of the Gripen fighter jet has been unveiled by Swedish aircraft maker, Saab. The Gripen E 39-8 prototype has a 15.2 metre (50ft) long body and a wingspan of 8.6 metres (28ft).

Uber's culture problems appear far from solved. Board member David Bonderman resigned Tuesday after making sexist comment at a meeting that took place a day after the release of a report into allegations of a hostile work environment at Uber. CEO Travis Kalanick is on an indefinite leave of absence. When he returns, he'll likely have a completely new management team. SAN FRANCISCO -- Uber now has 47 detailed recommendations from an exhaustive internal investigation on how to overhaul its company culture, from making its board more independent to keeping records of human resources complaints.

One of the very hot topics so far in 2017 is artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential disruptive impact on the legal profession. Questions ranging from, "Will AI replace lawyers?" to "Does it make sense to attend law school with the rise of AI?" to "How will AI impact the delivery, cost, and quality of legal services?" IN FACT, THE INTERSECTION OF AI AND THE LAW HAS recently captured the attention of major media outlets including The New York Times ("A.I. is Doing Legal Work. In addition, nowadays you would be hardpressed to attend a legal conference without a session, panel, or presentation on AI. This article reviews the basics of AI, key use cases for AI in the legal profession, some primary AI-related legal issues, and steps that your law firm or in-house legal department may want to take to become AI-ready. In his book "The Fourth Industrial Revolution,"3 Klaus Schwab, executive chairman and founder of The World Economic Forum, begins by briefly reviewing the three earlier industrial revolutions that transformed our society and then devotes the remainder of the book to describing how our world recently entered a whole new era in which we will witness unprecedented major and rapid technological innovations. AI has the potential to be a disruptive force in our "Fourth Industrial Revolution." Like many newer and transformational technologies, there is no uniform definition for AI. An October 2016 report issued by the White House called "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence" states the following: "Some define AI loosely as a computerized system that exhibits behavior that is commonly thought of as requiring intelligence.

At the beginning of the decade, George Whitesides helped rewrite the rules of what a machine could be with the development of biologically inspired "soft robots." Now he's poised to rewrite them again, with help from some plastic drinking straws. Inspired by arthropod insects and spiders, Whitesides and Alex Nemiroski, a former postdoctoral fellow in Whitesides' Harvard lab, have created a type of semi-soft robot capable of standing and walking. The team also created a robotic water strider capable of pushing itself along the liquid surface. The robots are described in a recently published paper in the journal Soft Robotics.

Since the plagues of the Old Testament, we have contemplated the Apocalypse, the world rising in vengeance as men, women and children scurry across the brutal landscape of a lost paradise. Our doomsday stories and how they scroll and flash before us have changed since the parchment days of the Bible. But we remain fascinated by the specter of our demise, whether the end is wrought by deities, our own folly or imposed by outside forces like monsters, asteroids and aliens that have haunted us since Orson Welles' 1938 "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast. Few of our dystopias, however, are as frightening as the planet gone asunder, polluted and destroyed by humanity's amorality, recklessness and greed. Film and literature -- to say nothing of our private insecurities -- resound with a world that freezes, boils, chokes, cracks with earthquakes, dwindles with resources and succumbs to pestilence and disease.