Fourteen hour days sitting in the cab of a truck has given Bryan Peters nearly everything he wanted from life. His trucker's salary helped him raise his now-adult daughter, build his dream home and carve out a few hours on weekends to hit the golf course. It's a version of the American dream, Peters, a lifelong self-described Republican, has faith President-elect Donald Trump will protect for future generations of truck drivers and other working-class Americans like him. "He understands the working class man out here, he worked his ass of to get where he is today," Peters, 48, said in a phone interview with International Business Times. "It doesn't matter if it's a driver, factory worker, whoever, [Trump is] going to put more jobs on the table... Truck driving, one of the most common working-class job in Trump's economy, brings good pay and doesn't require a college degree. But like many of the blue-collar jobs the president-elect regularly promised to save during his campaign, its ...

Microsoft is taking another shot at giving users a friendly AI-driven bot conversation partner. On Monday, the company released Zo, a chatbot that users can converse with on Kik, the popular messaging platform. Zo is a follow-up to Tay, the tech giant's first foray into friendly, English-speaking chatbots. It's clear that the company has learned from its first attempt, when the friendly chatbot was turned into a font of white supremacist propaganda by malicious users. In contrast, Zo adamantly refuses to discuss political matters.

You may know Watson as IBM's Jeopardy-winning, cookbook-writing, dress-designing, weather-predicting supercomputer-of-all trades. Starting today, 40 organizations will rely upon the clever computers cognitive power to help spot cybercrime. The Watson for Cybersecurity beta program helps IBM too, because Watson's real-world experience will help it hone its skills and work within specific industries. After all, the threats that keep security experts at Sun Life Financial up at night differ from those that spook the cybersleuths at University of New Brunswick. IBM researchers started training Watson in the fundamentals of cybersecurity last spring so the computer could begin to analysize and prevent threats.

President Obama is making a push for transparency in his last days in office before handing off the vast counter-terrorism apparatus he has built to President-elect Donald Trump, starting with a major address Tuesday defending his record on national security. Obama's speech, at the U.S. military's Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., will also explain the legal and policy underpinnings that his administration has established over eight years in deciding whether and how to detain, interrogate or kill suspected terrorists. The White House released some details on its legal rationale ahead of the speech. The efforts at transparency were striking for an administration criticized for being secretive by news and watchdog organizations; Obama has used the Espionage Act more times than all other U.S. presidents combined to investigate leaks of government information. The bid for openness also served to make public additional facts that can be used to hold the Trump administration accountable, though the White House downplayed any message to the president-elect.

Silicon Valley voted heavily for Hillary Clinton, but companies working on driverless cars seem overjoyed with President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for transportation secretary, Elaine Chao. Chao will wield great power over how driverless cars and other automated vehicles will be regulated – or not. Although she needs to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate first, she's highly regarded in Washington, especially among Republicans, and her husband is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Moreover, as secretary of Labor under President George W. Bush, Chao was known not for the rules she crafted and enforced, but for her free-market approach that was generally hands-off. For those in Silicon Valley and other tech firms where fears abound about too much government intervention and meddling, that's a big relief.

They don't transport people around, but drones would fall under Elaine Chao's purview if President-elect Donald Trump's nominee is confirmed as secretary of Transportation. In the role, Chao -- who was Labor secretary under George W. Bush -- would oversee the nation's transportation systems and infrastructure, a wide-ranging job that also encompasses cars, trains and ships. Among the questions she'll have to answer on the drone front: whether the unmanned aerial vehicles will eventually be allowed to fly farther than their operators can see, function autonomously and fly over people on the ground. Silicon Valley voted heavily for Hillary Clinton, but companies working on driverless cars seem overjoyed with President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for transportation secretary, Elaine Chao. Chao will wield great power over how driverless cars and other automated vehicles will be regulated –... Silicon Valley voted heavily for Hillary Clinton, but companies working on driverless cars seem overjoyed with President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for transportation secretary, Elaine Chao.

The United Nations forecasts that the global population will rise from 7.3 billion to nearly 10 billion by 2050, a big number that often prompts warnings about overpopulation. Some have come from neo-Malthusians, who fear that population growth will outstrip the food supply, leaving a hungry planet. Others appear in the tirades of anti-immigrant populists, invoking the specter of a rising tide of humanity as cause to slam borders shut. Still others inspire a chorus of neo-Luddites, who fear that the "rise of the robots" is rapidly making human workers obsolete, a threat all the more alarming if the human population is exploding. They may be the one thing that can protect the global economy from the dangers that lie ahead.

Cecila Malmstrom publicly speaks of torture. On October 4, when the European politician stood up in parliament to give her support for laws banning the export of items used for implementing the death penalty, there should have been little controversy. But when footage of her speech was posted online, nobody saw it. YouTube removed the video, which had been uploaded by fellow MEP Marietje Schaake. "I did not know whether this decision was made by a human or whether this was the result of an automated decision," the Dutch politician told WIRED.

MIT researchers have unveiled a new way for consumers and businesses to take to the skies -- by designing and developing their own drones. The program, created by a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is a prototype computer system (.PDF) which allows users to create a variety of drones. According to the lab, users can design, simulate and build custom drones, altering the size, shape, and structure depending on how they want their drones fabricated and their purpose -- which impacts on factors including payload tolerance, flight time, and battery life. To demonstrate the system, CSAIL created a range of unusual drones, including a five-rotor "pentacopter" and a rabbit-shaped "bunnycopter." MIT says the program could pave the way for businesses and consumers to develop new drones able to perform a wider variety of functions.

A few weeks ago, Montreal-based AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio launched Element AI, a Silicon Valley-style startup incubator dedicated to deep learning. Despite its modest (but growing) startup scene, Montreal is already a hotbed in AI talent, with a trove of deep learning researchers across the city. Bengio -- along with Jean-François Gagné, Nicolas Chapados, Jean-Sébastien Cournoyer, and the rest of their team of tech mavericks -- is hoping to accelerate the proliferation of AI startups and researchers in Montreal to turn the city into an AI center. As a proud Montrealer and bot maker, I couldn't be happier with this news. Surprisingly, though, the launch received some mixed feedback locally.