The 19th-century U.K. Locomotive Act, also known as the Red Flag Act, required motorized vehicles to be preceded by a person waving a red flag to signal the oncoming danger. Movies can be a good place to see what the future looks like. According to Robert Wallace, a retired director of the CIA's Office of Technical Service: "... When a new James Bond movie was released, we always got calls asking, 'Do you have one of those?' If I answered'no', the next question was, 'How long will it take you to make it?' Folks didn't care about the laws of physics or that Q was an actor in a fictional series--his character and inventiveness pushed our imagination ..."3 As an example, the CIA successfully copied the shoe-mounted spring-loaded and poison-tipped knife in From Russia With Love. It's interesting to speculate on what else Bond movies may have led to being invented. For this reason, I have been considering what movies predict about the future of artificial intelligence (AI). One theme that emerges in several science fiction movies is that of an AI mistaken for human.

Who do we become when we die? Our identities are such fragile, personally curated things: we go through life as children, then students and peers, and sometimes switch to a vocational preference. A person becomes farmer, shepherd, mechanic, soldier, baker, homemaker, brigand, or bandit, or backyard bomb-maker -- whichever strikes us by calling or necessity. People assume narrower identities, a lover for an afternoon, a wedding guest for a weekend. Perhaps it's the wrong wedding, the wrong place, the wrong people, and whatever mish-mash of identities, they end with a hellfire strike and a grim, clinical finality. The bodies become "military-age males," the rich matrixes of interwoven identities collapsed into two categories, a fatal guilt decided abroad in the moment of impact.

Drone supporters often say that strikes are effective, their targets aren't random and are not a recruiting tool for various armed groups. A look at the evidence, though, demonstrates otherwise. In this week's Reality Check, Mehdi Hasan explains why he believes that drone strikes are ineffective, inaccurate and unsuccessful. Follow UpFront on Twitter @AJUpFront and Facebook.

An anti-ship cruise missile (ASCM) developed by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that "thinks" thanks to its onboard artificial intelligence (AI) will arm U.S. Navy warships and strike aircraft beginning 2019 and U.S. Air Force combat aircraft a year earlier. The Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) can find a warship target on its own by using its onboard AI to locate a specific warship from among a fleet of enemy warships. A multi-mode seeker guided by the AI ensures the correct warship is hit in a specific area to maximize the probability of sinking the target. The AI enables autonomous targeting by using on-board targeting systems to independently acquire a target without the need for prior precision intelligence, GPS or data-links. These capabilities allow positive target identification and the precision engagement of moving warships in an enemy fleet heavily defended by surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and electronic countermeasures. The missile is designed with counter-countermeasures to evade active defense systems on enemy ships.

The FBI has access to nearly 412 million photos in its facial recognition system--perhaps including the one on your driver's license. But according to a new government watchdog report, the bureau doesn't know how error-prone the system is, or whether it enhances or hinders investigations. Since 2011, the bureau has quietly been using this system to compare new images, such as those taken from surveillance cameras, against a large set of photos to look for a match. That set of existing images is not limited to the FBI's own database, which includes some 30 million photos. The bureau also has access to face recognition systems used by law enforcement agencies in 16 different states, and it can tap into databases from the Department of State and the Department of Defense.

Accenture's technology R&D head urges China to scale up smart machine trials at home and abroad, Chen Yingqun and Zhang Xia report. China should step up its efforts to adopt artificial intelligence in its industries to boost the country's economic transformation, according to French technology expert Marc Carrel-Billiard. The development of artificial intelligence is a hot topic in China, he said, especially since the central government unveiled the Made in China 2025 strategy, which largely aims to upgrade the manufacturing industry with high-technology over the next decade. AI refers to machines or systems that can understand, learn and act independently, allowing them to take on cognitive functions otherwise performed by a human, such as problem-solving. Carrel-Billiard said such technology is important due to the shift toward greater connectivity, either through cloud computing or smart networks.

The fact that Catherine - who's learned that her ex-husband Theodore has taken up with Samantha, a honey-voiced Operating System who screens his emails, entertains his fantasies and sends his writing off to publishers - comes off as judgmental is testament to Jonze's filmmaking skills. But it's also proof of how deeply we've internalised the notion that artificial intelligence is an extension of male desires and that, really, few things may be hotter than the hard-to-nail promise of female servitude. As Laurie Penny writes in an April 2016 article in The New Statesman, the issue of whether or not robots are slaves designed to serve their masters or sentient beings with inner lives and autonomous instincts has long paralleled the questions we ask of women in the world. READ MORE: * New Zealand could become first country to use Domino's pizza delivery robot * Drones, self-drive cars and'car butler' in our near future * Professor hopes robots will take over the rehabilitation world * Robots could threaten up to half New Zealand's jobs in next 20 years * Robots fooling humans they love something that can't love them back: AI expert * Self-learning robot escapes Russian facility, disrupts traffic * New robot from Google shows off human-like qualities Robots may take on domestic tasks and give working mothers more time. From Metropolis, the 1927 Fritz Lang classic in which Maria, a cyborg whose sultry ways plunge the city and its workers into chaos (she's later burned at a stake) to Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, the hit 1997 spy film whose comely fembots are programmed to ensnare the bumbling Powers with his own libido, female robots are often cast as temptresses or destroyers, coincidentally enough, the same roles reserved for flesh-and-blood women.

With customers like the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps, Boston Dynamics doesn't go out of its way to build friendly-looking robots. But its newest creation, SpotMini, is even creepier than the others. It looks like some sort of dog/giraffe hybrid, but unlike either of those, it's definitely not cute. SpotMini is a smaller version of the company's Spot robot. It weighs 55 lbs (65 lbs if you add the arm).

It's time for another edition of "What TNW is reading." If you're not familiar with them, take a moment and enjoy the previous edition about the US election. After having first been colonized by the Spanish, the country – in its own weird way – is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and one of the busiest ports in the Northern Hemisphere. One of its four official languages is English and they managed to smush them all together to create Papiamentu, the local language. Speaking all four languages fluently, Cecil is currently adding French and Russian to the mix… he's such an?????????.

The Californian desert rushes up in front of me. I can see the runway at Edwards Air Force Base emerging clearly from the hills, and I try to keep the nose of my spacecraft pointed straight down the centre. I am flying the Dream Chaser space plane back from a stint at the International Space Station (ISS), and am keenly aware of my delicate cargo – and the craft's past failures. I'm seated in front of three computer monitors, which show my view out of the cockpit, and rear and side views of the spacecraft as it descends. To go easy on me, the Draper crew starts the simulation after the Dream Chaser has already entered Earth's atmosphere and headed down towards the ground, so all I have to do is aim it straight at the runway.