The wild west days of drone flight came to end earlier this year when the FAA began requiring that pilots register their aircraft with the agency. If you want to use your Unmanned Aircraft System (as the FAA calls them) for anything remotely commercial, you'll need to go a step further and pass a test. The registration is not particularly onerous, though there is a processing fee. The whole thing starts to feel a bit Kafkaesque when you get to the end and realize that you can "display" your registration number by writing it on the battery and then tucking that inside the aircraft. WAT? It's also unclear how often the regulations are going to be updated, or how the rules of flight are going to be enforced. For example, one rule states that a pilot has to maintain constant visual contact with his drone, but the signal range of some new models extends so far that it can fly up to two miles away from the operator.

THE descent into a post-truth world continues at a depressing rate. The latest winner of the pants-on-fire award is former US presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. In an interview with CNN after a speech in which Donald Trump wrongly claimed that violent crime was rising, Gingrich cherry-picked the facts – then abandoned them altogether. "The average American does not think crime is down," he said. "As a political candidate, I'll go with what people feel."

It's been a busy summer in the artificial intelligence (A.I.) space, but the most interesting A.I. opportunities might not be coming from the biggest names. You may have heard about Tesla's self-driving cars that made headlines twice, for vastly different reasons -- a fatal crash in Florida in which the driver was using the Autopilot software, and claims by a Missouri man that the feature drove him 20 miles to a hospital after he suffered a heart attack, saving his life. Or you might have heard of Apple spending 200 million to acquire machine learning and A.I. startup Turi. A smart drone defeated an experienced Air Force pilot in flight simulation tests. IBM's Watson diagnosed a 60-year-old woman's rare form of leukemia within 10 minutes, after doctors had been stumped for months.

Top e-retailers apply artificial intelligence, bots and a mobile-first approach to push mobile commerce well beyond sites and apps. Many retailers are likely familiar with, and perhaps even own, a Staples Easy Button. They may have even tapped the tchotchke a time or two, prompting the bright red plastic button to cheerfully chirp the office supply retailer's tagline, "That was easy!" But calling out the retailer's slogan was the extent of the Easy Button's capabilities. Staples is testing how consumers react to it incorporating machine learning in its Easy Button that enables shoppers to press the button to order a product by voice, or to ask common questions, such as when an order will be delivered or the status of a return.

WASHINGTON – CIA Director John Brennan warned on Sunday that Russia has "exceptionally capable and sophisticated" computer capabilities and that the U.S. must be on guard. When asked in a television interview whether Russia is trying to manipulate the American presidential election, Brennan didn't say. But he noted that the FBI is investigating the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails, and he cited Moscow's aggressive intelligence collection and its focus on high-tech snooping. "I think that we have to be very, very wary of what the Russians might be trying to do in terms of collecting information in a cyber realm, as well as what they might want to do with it," he told CBS' "Face the Nation" on the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. On the terrorism threat, Brennan said the U.S. government is much better now at sharing information.

We have seen how the internet of things and the growing phenomenon of'big data' will throw up major problems for consumers and citizens, problems that have as yet barely been grasped by most policy-makers. In this world of growing complexity, the potential for an unintended consequence becomes greater and greater from machines performing an action that was not anticipated. There are key issues, too, about our reliance on data at a time of massive data generation, data storing and data preservation which have the potential to both obscure results and generate injustices. Perhaps the greatest issue that we now face is caused by our blind faith in machines. We have invested them with certainty and – as we have pointed out – we trust them. Part of the reason for this is an odd confusion that has conflated the machines of the industrial age with the machines of the information age.

When you're a firefighter, your life is always on the brink of danger. Now, NASA has developed an artificial intelligence system called AUDREY that could help save the lives of firefighters by nagivating them in smoke-filled burning establishments. Meet AUDREY (Assistant for Understanding Data through Reasoning, Extraction, and sYnthesis), an artificial intelligence system being developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. According to a report from Smithsonian, AUDREY is a technology that tracks the firefighters movements and guides them to safety during rescue. The technology originated from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's work on space rovers kused on Mars.

Advances in machine learning and mobile robotics mean that robots could do your job better than you. That's led to some radical predictions of mass unemployment, much more leisure or a work free future. Queen Elizabeth I denied a patent for a knitting machine over fears it would create unemployment, Ricardo thought technology would lower wages and Keynes famously predicted a 15 hour working week by 2030. Understanding why these beliefs proved to be wrong gives us important insights into why similar claims about robotisation might be incorrect. But automation could nevertheless have sizeable distributional implications and ramifications well beyond the industries in which it's deployed.

Last year, McKinsey launched a multi-year study to explore the potential impact of automation technologies on jobs, organizations and the future of work. "Can we look forward to vast improvements in productivity, freedom from boring work, and improved quality of life?," its initial article on the study asked, or "Should we fear threats to jobs, disruptions to organizations, and strains on the social fabric?" Most jobs involve a number of different tasks or activities. Some of these activities are more amenable to automation than others. But just because some of the activities have been automated, does not imply that the whole job has disappeared. To the contrary, automating parts of a job will often increase the productivity and quality of workers by complementing their skills with machines and computers, as well as by enabling them to focus on those aspects of the job that most need their attention.

CIA Director John Brennan participates in a session at the third annual Intelligence and National Security Summit in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 8, 2016. WASHINGTON -- CIA Director John Brennan warned on Sunday that Russia has "exceptionally capable and sophisticated" computer capabilities and that the U.S. must be on guard. "I think that we have to be very, very wary of what the Russians might be trying to do in terms of collecting information in a cyber realm, as well as what they might want to do with it," he told CBS' "Face the Nation" on the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. On the terrorism threat, Brennan said the U.S. government is much better now at sharing information. He praised Saudi Arabia as "a good example of how foreign intelligence services can work against these terrorist organizations."