"Criminal was killed by robot" might soon become a standard police report. Just as an anonymous "police sniper," this robot gives the operator a chance to remain anonymous while pressing the red button to relay a kill command. The DOGO crawling traction tactical combat robot unveiled by Israeli General Robotics Ltd. was developed with counterterrorism in mind. The machine, operated remotely from a Panasonic touchpad, boasts 360-degree vision and audio intercom for conducting negotiations. It can be armed with non-lethal weapons, such as pepper spray and flashlight blinders, but it can also serve as an unemotional and lethal terminator.

Senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett is still listing "ending two wars" as one of the major accomplishments of the Obama administration, despite deepening U.S. involvement overseas – including the recent U.S. drone strike that took out Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Akhtar Mansour. Jarrett, one of President Obama's closest aides, made the remarks in an interview aired Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes." Asked whatever happened to the president's call for "hope and change," she cited a slew of changes during Obama's two terms: "Just look at what's happened in the last seven years. While the interview may have been conducted before the official Pentagon announcement, her comments coincided with the news that a drone strike had taken out Taliban leader Mansour in the Pakistan province of Baluchistan – the latest sign of the prolonged fight in the Middle East and South Asia. Even before those comments, the administration was taking criticism for efforts to downplay U.S. military actions against terror and insurgent groups.

If you look at the record, America has been concerned about not alienating Pakistan for the last 10 years or more. But the Afghans are clear about this, and the Americans know that one of the reasons the Taliban insurgency has been resilient is that they have sanctuaries across the border in Pakistan, in Balochistan. I think the Americans were thinking that Pakistan would probably deliver the Taliban, because they had influence over them. Pakistan claims they have control, but then they say, "well, we don't have full control, we can bring them to the table but we can't make them do things unless you promise something concrete."

SeaDrone, the underwater robot coming out of a new company founded by two Stanford AI lab veterans, is aiming to make fish farming a lot easier--particularly for smaller aquaculture operations--by making underwater inspection cheaper and easier. The ocean ROV's story is not an unusual one for Silicon Valley: two Stanford students meet over a lab bench, get an idea that something they'd been tinkering around with for themselves could be turned into a product and the basis of a company. It's a story Silicon Valley loves. Eduardo Moreno met Shuyun Chung in the Stanford AI lab in 2013. Moreno, in the thick of his studies for a master's degree in mechanical engineering, was working on underwater robot hardware in collaboration with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

Probabilistic modeling is cyclical: we specify a model, infer its posterior, and evaluate its performance. Evaluation drives the cycle, as we revise our model based on how it performs. This requires a metric. Traditionally, predictive accuracy prevails. Yet, predictive accuracy does not tell the whole story. We propose to evaluate a model through posterior dispersion. The idea is to analyze how each datapoint fares in relation to posterior uncertainty around the hidden structure. We propose a family of posterior dispersion indices (PDI) that capture this idea. A PDI identifies rich patterns of model mismatch in three real data examples: voting preferences, supermarket shopping, and population genetics.

The University of Washington School of Law is delighted to announce a public workshop on the law and policy of artificial intelligence, co-hosted by the White House and UW's Tech Policy Lab. The event places leading artificial intelligence experts from academia and industry in conversation with government officials interested in developing a wise and effective policy framework for this increasingly important technology. The event is free and open to the public but requires registration. Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. He is the founder and director of Yale's Information Society Project, an interdisciplinary center that studies law and new information technologies.

The University of Washington School of Law is delighted to announce a public workshop on the law and policy of artificial intelligence, co-hosted by the White House and UW's Tech Policy Lab. The event places leading artificial intelligence experts from academia and industry in conversation with government officials interested in developing a wise and effective policy framework for this increasingly important technology. The event is free and open to the public but requires registration.

HARI SREENIVASAN: The man who led the Afghan Taliban for the past year was killed in a U.S. operation over the weekend. The group had been gaining ground and waging a bloody war against the Afghan government. So, what's next for the Taliban, and the countries who fight it? Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner begins our coverage. MARGARET WARNER: Smoldering wreckage on a Pakistani roadside was all that remained of the Taliban commander's vehicle hours after he died in it Saturday.

On a spring afternoon in 2014, Brisha Borden was running late to pick up her god-sister from school when she spotted an unlocked kid's blue Huffy bicycle and a silver Razor scooter. Borden and a friend grabbed the bike and scooter and tried to ride them down the street in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Coral Springs. Just as the 18-year-old girls were realizing they were too big for the tiny conveyances--which belonged to a 6-year-old boy--a woman came running after them saying, "That's my kid's stuff." Borden and her friend immediately dropped the bike and scooter and walked away. But it was too late--a neighbor who witnessed the heist had already called the police. Borden and her friend were arrested and charged with burglary and petty theft for the items, which were valued at a total of 80. Compare their crime with a similar one: The previous summer, 41-year-old Vernon Prater was picked up for shoplifting 86.35 worth of tools from a nearby Home Depot store. Prater was the more seasoned criminal. He had already been convicted of armed robbery and attempted armed robbery, for which he served five years in prison, in addition to another armed robbery charge. Borden had a record, too, but it was for misdemeanors committed when she was a juvenile.

Fiction is full of evil robots, from the Cylons of "Battlestar Galactica" to the vengeful replicants of Blade Runner to the iconic, humanity-destroying Terminators. Yet these are all robots built from good intentions, whose horrific violence is an unintended consequence of their design, rather than the explicit point. What if, instead of human folly, an artificial intelligence caused harm because a human explicitly designed it for malicious purposes? A new study, funded in part by Elon Musk, looks at the possibilities of deliberately evil machines. Titled "Unethical Research: How to Create a Malevolent Artificial Intelligence," by Roman V. Yampolskiy of the University of Louisville and futurist Federico Pistono, the short paper looks at just what harm someone could do with an actively evil program.