In order to safeguard humanity, the single most important thing we must do will be to teach concepts of rights and values -- to machines. For instance, Stephen Hawking has said that "success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history...Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks." Hawking thus believes that the "development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Elon Musk has called the prospect of artificial intelligence "our greatest existential threat" and thinks that AI weaponry could pose an even bigger threat than nuclear warfare, which is why he supports regulatory oversight of AI. However, in the recent Stanford Report, "The Study Panel's consensus is that attempts to regulate'AI' in general would be misguided, since there is no clear definition of AI (it isn't any one thing), and the risks and considerations are very different in different domains."

It's just the way it is: the human being is a lazy creature. If it's possible not to do something, we don't do it. However, paradoxically this is a good thing, because laziness is… the engine of progress! Well, if a job's considered too hard or long-winded or complex for humans to do, certain lazy (but conscientious) humans (Homo Laziens?:) give the job to a machine! In cybersecurity we call it optimization.

Forget self-driving cars, soon you could be travelling around the city in self-driving drones. The taxi-finding app Uber is researching the plausibility of using vertical takeoff aircraft to fly its customers around cities. The technology could be available within a decade, according to Jeff Holden, head of products at Uber. Forget self-driving cars, soon you could be travelling around a city in self-driving drones. Artist's concept of a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft being developed by Aurora Flight Sciences for the US military is shown Jeff Holden, head of products at Uber told Recode he has been researching the idea of self-driving drones, so the company'can someday offer our customers as many options as possible to move around.' Mr Holden said landing on top of buildings in cities would help reduce commuting time and congestion dramatically.

They should, because autonomous vehicles are coming to reshape the infrastructure of America. And when they do, we'll analyze and fact-check their answers in our WIRED live blog right here starting at 8pm ET. WIRED's live blog will help you cut through the sound bites and political theater of the night to focus on the issues that matter most to you. Officially, Clinton and Trump will be debating "America's Direction, Securing America" and how to "Achieve Prosperity." How those platitudes will translate into real questions the citizens of America care about is anyone's guess.

Last Monday, the Obama Administration released a hundred-and-twelve-page policy tome, "Federal Automated Vehicles Policy," which, despite its sleep-inducing title, found an eager readership. The document contained long-awaited regulatory guidance on self-driving cars--a concept that has gone from sci-fi fantasy to legitimate industry in just a few short years. The official reaction from manufacturers has been muted. Nonetheless, the internal reaction was likely relief. Without federal recognition and regulatory authority, the autonomous-vehicle industry exists in legal limbo.

He is most famous for cracking the Enigma code, in a move that is said to have shortened WWII by two years and saved up to 22 million additional lives. But Alan Turing also pioneered the use of computers for making music. Now, 65 years after the first computer-generated music was recorded, researchers have restored the aural artefact, which paved the way for everything from synthesizers to modern electronica. When Professor Jack Copeland (right) and composer Jason Long (left) examined the 12-inch (30.5 cm) acetate disc containing the music, they found the audio was distorted. The recording was made 65 years ago by a BBC outside-broadcast unit at the Computing Machine Laboratory in Manchester, northern England.

Hackers and other nefarious types tend to hide their forums and marketplaces in one of two ways. The first relies on the widely used Tor software to anonymize traffic as it passes around the Internet and prevent it being tracked. This is known as the "dark net." Another option is to use websites hosted on the open portion of the Web but not indexed by search engines. This is the "deep net," and can be equally hard to navigate. To monitor hacker activity in these places, Nunes and co developed a crawler to gather information from HTML pages hosted on the deep net and the dark net. Obviously, a key part of this work is to point the crawler at the best starting pages, a task that must be done by humans familiar with these pages.

We have covered here at Equities many times the rising risk of cyber attacks and how new companies are coming out with unique products to prevent security hacks. One of the new companies we are following is SecBI (Security Business Intelligence). This Israel-based company was founded in 2014 under the leadership from experts at RSA. The company is headquartered in Be'er-Sheba as a part of the JCP Cyberlabs. SecBI's cyber-detection platform that combines advanced intelligent thinking-machine technology, cyber-security expertise and user feedback into a superior threat detector.

A robot has been detained by police at a political rally in Moscow, with authorities attempting to handcuff the machine. The rally was for Valery Kalachev, a candidate for the Russian Parliament, who had rented the robot for his campaign. Police have not confirmed why they detained the machine named Promobot, but local media was reporting the company behind the robot said police were called because it was "recording voters' opinions on [a] variety of topics for further processing and analysis by the candidate's team". A Promobot representative suggested it was detained because "perhaps this action wasn't authorised". Mr Kalachev has featured the robot at previous campaign stops.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), long the subject of science fiction, is now becoming more and more widespread and is seen as an increasingly important computer science across multiple industries. In Financial Services in particular, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing is increasingly used today to make sense of big, complex data in a wide range of areas. One such area is regulatory compliance. The use of AI – particularly Natural Language Understanding (NLU), a subset of Natural Language Processing – can help firms to realise a number of benefits, including improving the speed and efficiency with which they achieve compliance, and making that compliance much more robust. As we've seen over just the last couple of years with the introduction of MiFID I & II, UCITS, AIFMD and the like, there is a constant stream of documents being issued by regulators, which can each run to hundreds, or even thousands, of pages.