The Labor MP Jim Chalmers was at a town hall meeting in Eagleby, Queensland this week when an older couple approached him. They were part of a crowd that turned up to see Bill Shorten's "Bill Bus", Labor's resurrected campaign bus from last year's election, on its way from Queensland to New South Wales as part of a two-week tour. Eagleby had been devastated by recent flooding, a painful hit for a suburb that only five years ago had twice the rate of unemployment than the state average. Chalmers said the couple wanted to talk about "the kids" – not their own necessarily, just young people. In a suburb where, according to the 2011 census, close to 50% of the workforce comprised labourers, tradesmen, technicians, machinery operators and drivers, where were the jobs going to come from when everything was getting automated?

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but rods and cables may one day help NASA explore planets. For a few years now, scientists at NASA's Ames research center and students from the University of California Berkeley's Best Lab have teamed up to create so-called tentricity robots, which they hope to one day use for planetary exploration. These structures rely on a constant interaction between compression and tension. Because the robots have no rigid connections, their shapes can be deformed using a series of small motors. The motors pull on the cables and make the bots move by either rolling or hopping.

In late February, the UN-Secretary General held a press conference, highlighting the risk of starvation in East Africa and the necessity to raise funds to address the emergency situations in Somalia and South Sudan. Drought has been back in these countries and their neighbours since 2016, leading to a huge current food crisis. While governments are trying to handle the situation, how could technology innovations help prevent starvation and improve agriculture management in the future? We met with Laurent Rivière, a French 30 years-old entrepreneur, who shared with us his view on the subject with a combination of engineer pragmatism and changemaker idealism . Founder and CEO at Sunbirds for two years, he explained to us how his "bird of the sun," his solar drone, is addressing the agriculture challenges of the 21st century.

A state economic development board on Thursday approved an $8 million tax credit for General Motors as the company looks to expand its autonomous vehicle division with more than 1,100 hires in California. The GM tax credit was among more than $91 million in California Competes incentives for 114 companies approved at a board meeting in Sacramento of Gov. Jerry Brown's GO-Biz agency. The credits range from GM's $8 million to $20,000 for MinowCPA Corp., an accounting firm that plans to hire eight people in Newport Beach and Santa Ana. GM promises to hire 1,163 workers at an average salary of $116,000. San Francisco is the hub for GM's autonomous vehicle research and development since the company acquired Cruise Automation last year, said Kevin Kelly, a GM spokesman.

When science fiction author Isaac Asimov devised his Three Laws of Robotics he was thinking about androids. He envisioned a world where these human-like robots would act like servants and would need a set of programming rules to prevent them from causing harm. But in the 75 years since the publication of the first story to feature his ethical guidelines, there have been significant technological advancements. We now have a very different conception of what robots can look like and how we will interact with them. The highly-evolved field of robotics is producing a huge range of devices, from autonomous vacuum cleaners to military drones to entire factory production lines.

Russia's space-bound humanoid robot FEDOR (Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research) is being trained to shoot guns from both of its hands. The activity will help improve the android's motor skills and decision-making, according to its creators, who have also tried to address concerns that they're developing a real-life Terminator. "Robot platform F.E.D.O.R. showed shooting skills with two hands," wrote Russia's deputy Prime Minister, Dmitry Rogozin, on Twitter. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Tory voters' hard line on immigration gives Theresa May a Brexit headache - POLITICO

Chinese internet firm Baidu Inc has agreed to acquire US computer vision firm xPerception for an undisclosed amount to support their renewed efforts in artificial intelligence as Chinese tech firms face regulatory headwinds in the United States. "The acquisition of xPerception is the latest in a recent series of notable investments aimed at strengthening Baidu's position as a global leader in AI," it said. Baidu is targeting foreign personnel and technology as part of a wider drive to refocus company resources on developing artificial intelligence capabilities. Revenues from the firm's core search unit took a beating last year when the Chinese government tightened online ad regulations, culling a chunk of existing advertisers with new eligibility requirements. The announcement comes as other Chinese tech firms struggle with regulatory push-back on acquisitions in the US market.

One of the amazing (and scary) things about artificial intelligence programs is that in learning to mimic their human masters so perfectly, these wonders of computer software hold up a mirror to patterns of behavior we engage in every day but may not even notice. Beyond their extraordinary usefulness in industry, medicine and communications, these "learning" programs can lay bare the mental shortcuts we humans use to make sense of our world. Indeed, new research with artificial intelligence programs highlights the ethnic and gender biases of English speakers. In a first-of-its-kind effort, a group of Princeton University computer scientists set a widely used artificial intelligence program to the task of learning English by performing a massive "crawl" of the World Wide Web. After gobbling up some 840 billion words, the software developed a vocabulary of 2.2 million distinct words, and the fluency to use them in ways that were grammatically correct.

When Rachel Whetstone left Google two years ago to replace David Plouffe, a former Barack Obama official, as policy and communications vice-president at Uber, it seemed like a promising Silicon Valley role. The taxi-hailing app had a reputation for aggressive and even underhand tactics, and a CEO, in Travis Kalanick, with a reputation as a gaffe-prone "tech bro", but it was one of the fastest growing startups in the world, achieving a $50bn valuation (now almost $70bn) within just six years. However Whetstone departed the company this week amid a stunning array of scandals and controversies, including allegations of sexual harassment, a video of Kalanick berating an Uber driver, a legal battle with Google over the alleged theft of driverless car technology, the revelation that Uber used secret "Greyball" software to deceive city regulators, and allegations that the company had another program called "Hell" designed to spy on its arch-rival Lyft. For Whetstone it's been a hell of a ride. Public relations veteran Ed Zitron described Whetstone's job as the equivalent of having "two fists permanently punching you in the head".