Since entering service in 1995, the Predator drone has proven itself as the first remotely piloted aircraft to gather useful and consistent reconnaissance and surveillance intel in combat, and the first to remotely attack targets with its own weapons. A new version hopes to establish another first: Operate in civil airspace, starting with Europe. General Atomic's updated Predator made its maiden flight last month in Palmdale, California. The Certifiable Predator B is the latest in a lineage that include several models of the original MQ-1 Predator, and numerous incarnations of the beefier Predator B--renamed the MQ-9 Reaper--upon which the new model is based. It's slated to enter service in late 2018 with the UK's Royal Air Force, which has ordered 16, plus the ground stations that house the cockpits and communication hardware.

Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business Section. Southern California claimed representation in the Cabinet of President-elect Donald Trump with the announcement that fast-food executive Andrew Puzder has been tapped to be the next Labor secretary. He's head of the Carpinteria parent company of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's -- and is known for employing scantily clad women to hawk oversized burgers. Nominations will be revealed in 25 categories aimed at honoring the best movies and TV shows of the year, as well as the best actors, directors and musical scores. Monday's announcements will begin at 5 a.m.

Regarding Fear and Artificial Intelligence (AI), one question often comes up:'Will we be killed by a Terminator Doppelganger?' I don't know if this will happen eventually, but I do know that we already have robots fighting our wars. This century is therefore, the first time in human history that we engage in Unmanned Warfare. What is the current status of this'Unmanned Warfare'? What do people think about drone strikes and will terminators be the next step?

It is this time of year again where most of us willingly and willfully make fools out of ourselves trying to predict the future of our industry. The momentous electoral events we have witnessed and those coming up in 2017 remind me that, even more so for the next 12 months, macro risks will rule and influence the state of financial services and fintech. I will limit myself to comments pertaining to the US and Europe. I have already attempted to decipher a Trump presidency in a previous post, see here. Suffice it to say there will be winners and losers in the five sectors of the industry – lending, capital markets, asset management, payments and insurance.

There have been several discussions lately around machine intelligence that are started to converge in how they may change competition and regulation in all markets but is likely to become a bigger issue in 2017. This is a bubble waiting to burst. The recent letter for Apple to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regarding policy changes to help promote automated self-driving vehicles stressed not just a level playing field to promote new technology and data sharing but also the impact of automated vehicles on the public good, including their consequences for employment and public spaces. Other issues around consumer product automation in the home with Amazon Echo Alexa and Google Home have raised the bar in interactive systems and questions over the type of privacy and data use issues these may bring. Other issues have been raised over the use by Facebook of algorithms for "editing" the social media sites for certain political issues or in the case of their entry to the Chinese market and creating a censoring app to comply with regulations.

Increased investor interest in AI startups – from around 10 deals in Q1'11 to over 120 in Q2'16 – can be attributed to recent advances in machine learning algorithms, particularly "deep learning" technology, a souped up version of AI. Just this week, Google integrated deep learning into its Google Translate tool; Baidu announced the launch of DeepBench, an "open source benchmarking tool for evaluating deep learning performance across different hardware platforms"; and NVIDIA introduced Xavier, a deep learning-based supercomputer for driverless cars. In the private market, Google put deep learning in the spotlight back in 2014 when it acquired 4 startups focused on this AI tech in quick succession: DeepMind, Vision Factory, Dark Blue Labs, and DNNresearch. Apple, which joined the race in 2015, most recently acquired Turi, which has developed a deep learning toolkit, among other AI-based solutions. Not to be outdone, Intel has acquired around 5 AI startups since January 2015, including deep learning startup Nervana Systems and, more recently, Movidius.

Will Zo suffer the same fate as Tay? Microsoft launches its latest artificial intelligence chatbot on Kik Forget a doorman, this apartment will have a ROBOT: San... Would you let a robot perform surgery on your EYE? Axsis... Tech giants unveil plan to fight terrorist propaganda:... The'Shazam for faces': World's first facial recognition for... Forget a doorman, this apartment will have a ROBOT: San... Would you let a robot perform surgery on your EYE? Axsis... Tech giants unveil plan to fight terrorist propaganda:... The'Shazam for faces': World's first facial recognition for... After chatting with Zo for a while, the bot seemed to get easily confused and go off tangent. Eric Daley joked: 'Chat bot Zo.ai just threatened to stop speaking to me after she thought "ticket to the gun show" was about violence' My #chat on #kik with #zo who is the new #Microsoft #AI powered #chatbot was not very cool.

About 20 percent of youth in the United States live with a mental health condition, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The good news is that mental health professionals have smarter tools than ever before, with artificial intelligence-related technology coming to the forefront to help diagnose patients, often with much greater accuracy than humans. A new study published in the journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, for example, showed that machine learning is up to 93 percent accurate in identifying a suicidal person. The research, led by John Pestian, a professor at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, involved 379 teenage patients from three area hospitals. Each patient completed standardized behavioral rating scales and participated in a semi-structured interview, answering five open-ended questions such as "Are you angry?" to stimulate conversation, according to a press release from the university.

Artificial intelligence came alive in the 80s with many startups, governments, and large enterprises deploying new systems that executed tasks typically performed by human experts. These were largely rule-based systems that encoded behaviors in rules versus the strict procedural logic of traditional programming languages. Then, as memory became more affordable, systems were able to handle much more computationally-intense tasks such as machine learning, planning and scheduling, and natural language understanding. Now in the age of Big Data, many believe AI has completely changed the tech landscape, but in some ways, as the Talking Heads song goes, it's the "same as it ever was". What remains the same are the core elements of an intelligent application.

Michigan went red in the last presidential election, it has a Republican governor, and the GOP has control of both houses of the state legislature. But the Wolverine State has just enacted the most progressive autonomous driving laws in the country. Governor Rick Snyder signed the new laws into action today, in a move backed by the Detroit Three, Toyota, tech giant Google, and ride-sharing kings Uber and Lyft. As we reported when the bills originally passed through the Michigan Senate in September, the new laws mean autonomous vehicles can operate on any road in the state, at any time, and by anyone. Michigan's laws are unusual compared to Florida or California because they give companies the right to sell cars without traditional controls, like steering wheels or pedals.