For the past half decade, the technology industry has been racing to build better cameras into the hardware we use every day. Yet the surveillance age has inspired an odd cottage industry battling against this trend: a glut of cheap stickers and branded plastic slides designed to cover up the front-facing cameras on phones, laptops and even televisions. For years, security researchers have shown that hackers can hijack the cameras to spy on whomever is on the other end. To put that in perspective, think of all the things your devices have seen you do. Such warnings have finally caught on.

A startup founded by a former top boss at Nasa has emerged from so-called stealth mode with technology that claims to beat Apple, Google and Microsoft's voice recognition technology. Dan Goldin, who spent nearly all of the 1990s leading Nasa, has revealed KnuEdge, a machine learning company that already boasts Fortune 500 clients and 100m in private funding despite its under the radar nature for the last decade. "We are not about incremental technology. Our mission is fundamental transformation," said Goldin "We were swinging for the fences from the very beginning, with intent to create next-generation technologies that will in essence alter how humans interact with machines, and enable next-generation computing capabilities ranging from signal processing to machine learning." The US-based firm has revealed its first product, KnuVerse, which it claims is a military-grade voice recognition and authentication technology, and believes it is more powerful than the most advanced but early stage voice recognition used in services such as Apple's Siri and Google's Home and Alexa.

A drunken man walking along a sidewalk at night trips and falls directly in front of a driverless car, which strikes him square on, killing him instantly. Had a human been at the wheel, the death would have been considered an accident because the pedestrian was clearly at fault and no reasonable person could have swerved in time. But the "reasonable person" legal standard for driver negligence disappeared back in the 2020s, when the proliferation of driverless cars reduced crash rates by 90 percent. Now the standard is that of the reasonable robot. The victim's family sues the vehicle manufacturer on that ground, claiming that, although the car didn't have time to brake, it could have swerved around the pedestrian, crossing the double yellow line and colliding with the empty driverless vehicle in the next lane.

From 1992 to 2001, Dan Goldin served as the longest-tenured administrator of NASA, overseeing projects like the launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavor and the redesign of the International Space Station. After leaving NASA, Goldin spent some time bouncing around and studying robotics before accepting a position as the president of Boston University in 2003. He never officially held the position, however, because the school terminated his contract a day before he was slated to start (though he still got a 1.8 million payout). And then Goldin mostly vanished from the public eye for over 10 years. Today, the 75-year-old Goldin has reemerged to reveal what he has been working on for the past decade: KnuEdge, a top-secret startup based in San Diego, with a mission to one-up Google, AMD, and Intel with the "fundamental invention" of the next-generation computer processor.

If she seems a little robotic, well, that's because she's actually an artificially intelligent entity living inside a software platform. From Alexa to Viv, the world is now full of voice-enabled cloud-connected assistants. But Amelia is more than merely a series of speech-savvy algorithms -- she's Siri with a doctorate in psychology. Thanks to advances in semantic analysis, Amelia can step you all the way through a sophisticated business process, like purchasing insurance. By analyzing the language you use and your tone of voice, Amelia can also detect when you're unhappy and pass you immediately to a human.

It's not all that easy to call KnuEdge a startup. Created a decade by Daniel Goldin, the former head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, KnuEdge is only now coming out of stealth mode. It has already raised 100 million in funding to build a "neural chip" that Goldin says will make data centers more efficient in a hyperscale age. Goldin founded the San Diego, Calif.-based company with the former chief technology officer of NASA, said he believes the company's brain-like chip will be far more cost and power efficient than current chips based on the computer design popularized by computer architect John von Neumann. In von Neumann machines, memory and processor are separated and linked via a data pathway known as a bus.

From 1992 to 2001, Dan Goldin served as the longest-tenured Adminstrator of NASA, overseeing projects like the launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavor and the redesign of the International Space Station. After leaving NASA, Goldin spent some time bouncing around and studying robotics, before accepting a position as the president of Boston University in 2003 -- a position Goldin never officially held, because the school terminated his contract a day before he was slated to start, though he still got a 1.8 million payout. And then, Goldin mostly vanished from the public eye for over ten years. Today, the 75-year-old Goldin has reemerged to reveal what he's been working on for the last decade: KnuEdge, a top-secret startup based in San Diego, with a mission to one-up Google, AMD, and Intel with the "fundamental invention" of the next-generation computer processor. "I'm not an incrementalist; I wanted to wait for the grand slam," Goldin tells Business Insider.

The Pentagon has teamed up with DARPA and other agencies to create a "self-aware" AI, robot, that will use posts on social media to decipher a threat level of an individual and determine whether or not they should be placed on a kill list. It's called "Thrust", a new initiative from the Pentagon that will use predictive social media algorithms to determine when to use lethal force. Under Jade Helm 15, a new era began, the era of artificial intelligence and predictive technologies that "map the human domain". And now just a year later, this field is greatly expanding. Admitted in the document is the use of governmental shills, designed to infiltrate social media groups such as on Facebook, Twitter or Google, and then take an analysis of sorts.

There is a new technology being tested for use on UK civilians en masse on our streets, millimetre microwave scanners. These electromagnetic radiation scanners, which use Ultra Wide Band (UWB) at 75-110 GHz, are able to be beamed at crowds to detect potential concealed weapons being carried by individuals. Using the same technology as the American airport TSA scanners, over which there has been much controversy in the level of detail these scanners reveal about an individual, MiRTLE, provided by Radio Physics Solutions (RPS) purports to use artificial intelligence (AI) to identify weapon shaped objects without the system revealing the human body image. Practically this would make sense, as a human operator seeing a crowd of people imaged by'millimetre' microwaves would not be able to effectively scan the crowd for weapon shaped objects or suicide vests. Note that security workers, particularly those working at airports, have been drilled in various PR talking points in order to assuage public concerns on this experimental technology, including the popular corporate line that, "It's perfectly safe – it's on only millimeter microwaves."

Peter Norvig is a director of research at Google. Previously he was head of Google's core search algorithms group and of NASA Ames's Computational Sciences Division, making him NASA's senior computer scientist. He received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has taught at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley, from which he received a PhD in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006. He is coauthor of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field.