Uber's showdown with California regulators is over, and the regulators won. After a week of legal threats, meetings, and very official letters, Uber announced late Wednesday that it would park the self-driving vehicles that have been providing rides in San Francisco. Legally, the company had little choice, because the state Department of Motor Vehicles officially revoked the registration on each of the 16 robo-cars after Uber brazenly refused to apply for an autonomous testing permit. Tough tactics aside, regulators did extend a hand in friendship. "I want to reassure you that the California Department of Motor Vehicles stands ready to work with you collaboratively," DMV Director Jean Shiomoto wrote in a letter to Uber public affairs head Davis White. Shiomoto said her agency "dedicated a team to work with you to expedite the [testing permit] approval process."

Imagine being trapped on a spaceship with only your lover and a robot bartender for nearly a century -- there isn't a spaceship big enough or a bar that well-stocked to make that sound appealing. This is the issue at the center of the ostensibly "romantic" sci-fi drama "Passengers," directed by Morten Tyldum from a script by Jon Spaihts. While romance is the intended effect, the film's real premise -- concealed by the glossy trailers -- is imbued with some seriously creepy undercurrents about bodily autonomy, consent and stalking. Instead of turning it into a horror movie, these issues are all breezily glossed over with the sex appeal of stars Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. The spaceship is the Avalon, 30 years into a 120-year autopilot journey to the planet colony Homestead II with 5,000 passengers on board, encased in pods that keep them in a state of suspended animation.

The report anticipates economic effects across several fronts. AI, like any new technology, is key to growth because it increases output without requiring increases in labor or capital. "In the last decade, despite technology's positive push, measured productivity growth has slowed in 30 of the 31 advanced economies, slowing in the United States from an average annual growth rate of 2.5% in the decade after 1995 to only 1.0% growth in the decade after 2005," the report states. Any increase in aggregate productivity from adopting artificial intelligence would be a welcomed change. But the resultant job automation is causing alarm.

California has forced Uber to remove its self-driving vehicles from the road, canceling the company's controversial pilot program in San Francisco after a week of embarrassing reports of traffic violations and repeated legal threats from state officials. The department of motor vehicles (DMV) announced late Wednesday that it had revoked the registration of 16 autonomous Uber cars, which the corporation deployed without proper permits last week and which were caught on numerous occasions running red lights. Uber, which had previously declared that its rejection of government regulations was an "important issue of principle", confirmed that it has stopped its pilot in a statement, adding: "We're now looking at where we can redeploy these cars but remain 100 percent committed to California and will be redoubling our efforts to develop workable statewide rules." DMV officials and state attorney attorney general Kamala Harris have noted that Uber must get a testing permit to test its Volvo XC90s, which are navigated by a computer system but have a driver in the front seat who can intervene when needed. "It was determined that the registrations were improperly issued for these vehicles because they were not properly marked as test vehicles," the DMV said in a statement.

Representation of human actions as a sequence of human body movements or action attributes enables the development of models for human activity recognition and summarization. We present an extension of the low-rank representation (LRR) model, termed the clustering-aware structure-constrained low-rank representation (CS-LRR) model, for unsupervised learning of human action attributes from video data. Our model is based on the union-of-subspaces (UoS) framework, and integrates spectral clustering into the LRR optimization problem for better subspace clustering results. We lay out an efficient linear alternating direction method to solve the CS-LRR optimization problem. We also introduce a hierarchical subspace clustering approach, termed hierarchical CS-LRR, to learn the attributes without the need for a priori specification of their number. By visualizing and labeling these action attributes, the hierarchical model can be used to semantically summarize long video sequences of human actions at multiple resolutions. A human action or activity can also be uniquely represented as a sequence of transitions from one action attribute to another, which can then be used for human action recognition. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for semantic summarization and action recognition through comprehensive experiments on five real-world human action datasets.

A new report from the White House warns that millions of jobs could be automated out of existence in coming years. But it cautions against one much discussed solution: giving away free money. The report, published this week by the President's Council of Economic Advisers, joins a growing body of work forecasting massive jobs losses due to automation and artificial intelligence. A paper published in 2013 by Oxford University researchers, for example, estimated that as many as 47 percent of all jobs could eventually be automated. The new report, likewise, forecasts millions of job losses in careers such as truck driving, as self-driving vehicles hit the roads, as well as low-skilled jobs.

Artificial intelligence should be welcomed for its potential economic benefits, according to a new White House report on AI and the economy, but "aggressive" public policy must be implemented to ensure everyone benefits from its development. While this new platform could potentially lead to new growth opportunities in the US, higher wages and more leisure time for people, there are obvious negative impacts on the horizon: "Job displacement is likely to be one of the most serious negative consequences of AI-driven automation, impacting entire industries and communities," the report says. Anywhere from 9 percent to 47 percent of jobs could be threatened over the next decade or two due to the rise of AI, the report says, citing outside research. Looking at driving-related jobs as a case study, the White House's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) estimates that somewhere between 2,196,940 and 3,089,990 jobs (out of 3,723,930 jobs, as of May 2015) will be threatened. Still, the report says, "Technology is not destiny; economic incentives and public policy can play a significant role in shaping the direction and effects of technological change."

"What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" asks Regina Dugan, then director of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In this breathtaking talk she describes some of the extraordinary projects -- a robotic hummingbird, a prosthetic arm controlled by thought, and, well, the internet -- that her agency has created by not worrying that they might fail.

It's no longer surprising to see postal services experimenting with delivering mail using drones. However, France is kicking things up a notch: its national mail service will be the first to deliver packages by drone on a regular route. DPDgroup, the express courier subsidiary of the mail service, is running a test program where a hexacopter drone (not shown here) will carry packages up to 6.6 pounds along a 9.3-mile route in France's southern Provence region. These are commercial customers using dedicated spaces to collect their orders, so you can't strictly compare this to Amazon's recent home delivery in the UK. It would be considerably more challenging to deliver to individuals, who don't have the luxury of secure areas or readily available staff.

In 2016, there were technological breakthroughs from improved object avoidance to a drone that can carry people. Drones also become more accessible with DJI's foldable Mavic Pro and almost Go Pro's Karma, but the latter was recalled after battery issues caused some of them to fall from the sky. Then in August, the FAA unveiled a certification process for drone pilots to fly legally. As the number of drone pilots multiplied, drone videos showed us parts of the world not previously viewable in ways that would have required big budgets and production crews. Here are a few of the most impressive videos that challenged our perspectives.