The Marine Corps is looking for jobs that Marines currently do which robots could do better. "Being a tiny scout and slipping through doorways" is one of them. Yesterday marked 15 years to the day since the United States formally entered into a War on Terror, and after 15 long years of war, it's not hard to imagine that there must be a better way. For the United States Marine Corps, which is focused narrowly on the work of fighting America's wars, that innovation can't come soon enough. General Robert B. Neller, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, is launching an innovation challenge today, specifically asking Marines to figure out what aspect of their jobs could be better done by robots.

Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has unveiled a campaign to utilise emerging technologies, including drones and artificial intelligence, to increase productivity at construction sites by 20% by 2025. According to Japanese newspaper The Japan Times, Abe announced the plan at the inaugural meeting of a think tank tasked with formulating new growth strategy policies. The panel of government officials and industry experts is expected to announce details of the construction productivity strategy before the end of 2017. The government intends to ramp up the use of drones and AI to increase the efficiency of surveys on centrally funded infrastructure projects, such as tunnels, bridges and dams. Faced with an ageing population, Japan is already leading the world in advancing the use of autonomous vehicles, with construction drones set to be used to automate groundworks for the 2020 Olympic games.

Retail sales fell in August, during what is traditionally back-to-school shopping season, as shoppers continued to rein in their spending. It was the first drop since March. U.S. retail sales fell 0.3% last month compared with July, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. July sales, however, were revised up slightly to 0.1% growth from an estimate of no growth. A drop in auto sales was expected to drag down overall August retail sales.

Economist Milton Friedman was in favor of replacing the Federal Reserve with a computer. Maybe he was on to something. To the contrary, as a monetarist he wanted the Fed to increase the stock of money at a constant, 3%-5% rate a year, a task he thought a computer quite capable of performing. The Fed's lagged response to the 2008 financial crisis and an anemic recovery since then have given a new sense of urgency to the quest for a monetary rule or rules. For economists, the main benefit of a rule is to make monetary policy transparent and predictable. Everyone knows where the ship is headed and can plan accordingly.

The role of technology-fueled algorithms in shaping our society, and how to use them responsibly, is one of the topics I'll be exploring at the Next:Economy Summit in San Francisco, October 10-11. Some years ago, John Mattison, the chief medical information officer of Kaiser Permanente, the large integrated health provider, said to me, "The great question of the 21st century is going to be'Whose black box do you trust?'" Mattison was talking about the growing importance of algorithms in medicine, but his point, more broadly, was that we increasingly place our trust in systems whose methods for making decisions we do not understand. A lot of attention has been paid to the role of algorithms in shaping the experience of consumers. Much less attention has been paid to the role of algorithms in shaping the incentives for business decision-making. For example, there has been hand-wringing for years about how algorithms shape the news we see from Google or Facebook.

Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka promised during the Republican National Convention that her father would offer more help to working families, and this week the elder Trump laid out more of the specifics: six weeks of paid maternity leave for new mothers and a new approach to tax breaks for child-care expenses. Perhaps the best that can be said is that it's refreshing to see a Republican presidential candidate advocate for federal paid family leave policies and financial assistance to help working parents afford the tremendous costs of raising children. Like so much of what Trump has said during the campaign, the proposal falls short on details, including how to pay for these new benefits, and it's woefully out of touch with the needs of many families. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's plan is similarly lacking in key details, but at least her plan is more attuned to the challenges faced by the growing proportion of families with no stay-at-home parents. And yet, the nation is probably better off with Trump offering a flawed, half-baked plan, rather than no plan, because it suggests a bipartisan consensus that maternity leave and child care are critical national issues that the federal government can do much more to address.

It's an adage that one should not speak ill of the dead. But when conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly died last week, I was among the many liberal writers who didn't hesitate to call her a hatemonger. Schlafly, who built her 40-year career on stoking intolerance, was a vocal supporter of segregation and discrimination in housing, voting, and the workplace. She pushed to make anti-gay activism a core feature of the conservative movement. Even as the national consensus evolved toward greater rights for many Americans who had once been marginalized, Schlafly remained staunchly opposed to progress.

Immigration officials have deported Jose Vega-Zuniga four times, but he's always returned, and usually landed behind bars. But a recent DUI arrest culminated in a federal conviction this summer that carried up to 20 years in prison. So, prosecutors allege, he left of his own accord. Days after a federal judge issued a warrant for his arrest, Vega-Zuniga, 38, crossed the border near San Diego, sitting in the front passenger seat as his wife drove her pickup into Mexico, prosecutors said. On Wednesday, nearly a month after the brazen escape, federal authorities arrested his wife, Elba Soto, at her Moreno Valley home, according to the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles.

It sounds laughable now, but remember back when we thought a black president portended a "post-racial society"? When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, you didn't have to put that phrase in quotes. It seemed like an entirely plausible concept. Now that Hillary Clinton stands to make history as the first woman president, no one is contemplating a post-gender society or even a post-sexist society. There are a bunch of reasons for this, not least the fact that liberal-leaning, elite media are getting so much mileage from clickbait stories about identity politics that a post-anything society (at least anything having to do with race, gender or some other trait that might render you less advantaged than someone else) would be bad for business.

The cashiers' demands were simple: management must remove the tracking software they had installed in the checkout terminals, or the cashiers would refuse to return to work. The technology that tracked their every movement – their speed, efficiency, etc – had been installed without their knowledge, they asserted, and was an invasion of privacy. While this seems like something one might see today, this happened nearly 40 years ago at the biggest supermarket chain in Denmark. It is easy to see these cashiers as luddites, anti-progress and anti-technology, but like the original luddites they had valid concerns about the way that new technologies are used by employers. New technologies can not only lead to jobs lost through automation, but can also change the nature of work itself in detrimental ways.