Photo Caption: DARPA categorizes artificial intelligence in three waves - Handcrafted Knowledge, Statistical Learning, Contextual Adaptation - to explain what it AI can do, what it can't do, and where it is headed.

In my work to prepare for the Future of Labor conversation we had at NewCo Shift a few weeks ago, I talked to a number of experts who are studying job losses due to automation and thinking about what might be done about it. Two ideas that came up a number of times were the "robot tax" and the "basic income." The ideas are complementary and one might fund the other. At its simplest, a "robot tax" is a tax on companies that choose to use automation to replace human jobs. There are obviously many variants of this idea and to my knowledge, no country or other taxing authority has implemented a robot tax yet.

In this excerpt from a #TalkingTech Live broadcast, the panelists weigh in on Uber's bad week, and what's next in ride hailing. LOS ANGELES -- This week's tech news was dominated by charges of sexual harassment and discrimination at ride-hailing service Uber, a potential push from Google to bring ride-sharing to the mass market and a move from Facebook to bring more ads to the social network. But Uber owned the most headlines, which started on Sunday with a blog from a former female engineer who described how the company's human resources department repeatedly deflected her and other women's reports of sexual harassment from their colleagues, even telling her that she could expect a negative performance review if she stayed on her alleged harasser's team. The blog post was seen as a wake-up call for Silicon Valley, where six out of 10 women say they've experienced unwanted sexual advances, according to a survey released last year. Still, many pointed out that the male-dominated tech industry has had several such "wake-up calls" -- to little avail.

Editor's Note: This article first appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, Scientific American's sister publication, as "Digitale Demokratie statt Datendiktatur." "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another." The digital revolution is in full swing. How will it change our world? The amount of data we produce doubles every year. In other words: in 2016 we produced as much data as in the entire history of humankind through 2015. Every minute we produce hundreds of thousands of Google searches and Facebook posts. These contain information that reveals how we think and feel. Soon, the things around us, possibly even our clothing, also will be connected with the Internet. It is estimated that in 10 years' time there will be 150 billion networked measuring sensors, 20 times more than people on Earth. Then, the amount of data will double every 12 hours. Many companies are already trying to turn this Big Data into Big Money. Everything will become intelligent; soon we will not only have smart phones, but also smart homes, smart factories and smart cities. Should we also expect these developments to result in smart nations and a smarter planet? The field of artificial intelligence is, indeed, making breathtaking advances. In particular, it is contributing to the automation of data analysis. Artificial intelligence is no longer programmed line by line, but is now capable of learning, thereby continuously developing itself. Recently, Google's DeepMind algorithm taught itself how to win 49 Atari games. Algorithms can now recognize handwritten language and patterns almost as well as humans and even complete some tasks better than them. They are able to describe the contents of photos and videos. Today 70% of all financial transactions are performed by algorithms. News content is, in part, automatically generated. This all has radical economic consequences: in the coming 10 to 20 years around half of today's jobs will be threatened by algorithms. It can be expected that supercomputers will soon surpass human capabilities in almost all areas--somewhere between 2020 and 2060.

This is "Cosmic Disclosure", and we have a special guest here with us, Corey Goode, and also, of course, William Henry, investigative mythologist who is the spiritual voice on "Ancient Aliens". And he's been out there as long as I have, bringing you all kinds of amazing knowledge about ascension. And since 2002, he's been very firmly on the heels of the Blue Sphere story. So we're having a stunning convergence now in which an investigative link that he's been tracking now for 13 years has finally come to fruition in people having experiences that link the past, the present, the future all together in a continuum of one phenomenon. William Henry: Thank you very much. David: I mean, you've been going through some amazing changes yourself. David: Do you think that these changes that you're going through – people are noticing obviously that you've lost a lot of weight. Do you think that this has something to do with your contact with these Blue Spheres? Corey: I was asked to go on a high vibratory diet. And instead, I was scarfing down corn dogs and ignoring them and gaining weight. And last time I was here, I got food poisoning from eating meat and other things that I probably shouldn't eat. It's like my medulla oblongata shut everything off and I mean, I couldn't eat meat. All I've eaten since January is fruit – are berries, bananas.

Industry-leading toy company Mattel (NASDAQ:MAT) had a rough 2016. Its problems, however, started much earlier. Mattel's iconic Barbie has fallen out of fashion, and in September of 2014, the company also lost the licensing for the lucrative Walt Disney Princess line to rival Hasbro after being the sole beneficiary for nearly 20 years. After that stumble, Mattel's performance has suffered -- the shoes left by the Disney darlings have simply been too big for Barbie to fill. As a result, investors have been left wondering if Mattel's best days are behind it.

Octopus-like robots are plucking strawberries in Spain, in the US machines are vacuuming apples off the trees, and in the UK they are feeding and milking cows. Robots are taking over fields around the world, and last week food and rural affairs secretary Andrea Leadsom suggested they could help replace the thousands of EU workers who currently help put food on British tables. And it is not just Brexit that is forcing the agricultural industry to embrace the next phase of mechanisation. Farmers are already having to rethink their operations in the face of higher minimum pay – mainly a result of the national living wage for over-25s, which came into effect last year. Robotic milking machines, in which cows queue up to milk themselves, are now mainstream, while systems tat automatically feed or track the health of livestock are on the rise.

After a delayed launch and one aborted delivery attempt, SpaceX's caution paid off Thursday when its Dragon capsule stuffed full of food, equipment, and experiments successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS). Now on its 10th re-supply mission, the private space company has become an essential part of the supply lines supporting an increasingly intricate space operation. After a GPS error scuttled its first docking attempt Wednesday, the Dragon capsule smoothly slipped close enough to the ISS for the space station's robotic arm to snag the craft early Thursday morning, along with the 5,500 pounds of goodies on board. "Looks like we've got a great capture," radioed space station commander Shane Kimbrough. In addition to a much needed food refresh, the capsule also contains more than 250 science experiments.

China has now overtaken Japan for having more robots than anywhere else in the world. The Chinese government is concerned about an ageing population and the rising cost of human labour making Chinese products less competitive. It is giving over $100 Billion in subsidies for companies to replace more human workers with robots. It's hoped that the workers that will no longer work in the factories will move to the growing service sector, in part to help look after the ageing population. Countries In the west have already lost large numbers of manufacturing jobs to china but we shouldn't get too smug about our white-collar jobs in high tech, administration, clerical and production being safe from A.I. systems in the future.

The brain is capable of massively parallel information processing while consuming only 1–100 fJ per synaptic event. Inspired by the efficiency of the brain, CMOS-based neural architectures and memristors are being developed for pattern recognition and machine learning. However, the volatility, design complexity and high supply voltages for CMOS architectures, and the stochastic and energy-costly switching of memristors complicate the path to achieve the interconnectivity, information density, and energy efficiency of the brain using either approach. Here we describe an electrochemical neuromorphic organic device (ENODe) operating with a fundamentally different mechanism from existing memristors. ENODe switches at low voltage and energy ( 10 pJ for 103 μm2 devices), displays 500 distinct, non-volatile conductance states within a 1 V range, and achieves high classification accuracy when implemented in neural network simulations. Plastic ENODes are also fabricated on flexible substrates enabling the integration of neuromorphic functionality in stretchable electronic systems. Mechanical flexibility makes ENODes compatible with three-dimensional architectures, opening a path towards extreme interconnectivity comparable to the human brain.