The Pentagon says a U.S. airstrike in Syria this month killed what the Defense Department describes as a senior Al Qaeda leader who once had ties to Usama bin Laden. Jeff Davis, identified the target as Haydar Kirkan. The spokesman says Kirkan oversaw the planning of attacks against Western targets outside of Syria, including in Turkey. Brett McGurk, the president's special envoy in the fight against the Islamic State terror group, called Haydar a "legacy Al Qaeda terrorist and external plotter," in a tweet. Davis said a U.S. drone carried out the airstrike Oct. 17 in the vicinity of Idlib, in western Syria.

They're not driven by the unknown, but by the present. Let's look at the last epoch-changing technological development: the internet. The tech utopians of the late 20th century saw the incoming digital revolution as a liberating force, one that would dismantle the old power structures that oppress us and help humanity build a new, more perfect society. It's painfully clear now that their hypothesis was laughably naive. Who, exactly, has the internet liberated? Silicon Valley tech tycoons and advertisers aside, it has decimated the music, film and publishing industries, slashed the earnings of musicians, writers, photographers, and just about every other professional whose product can be digitized, shrinking their industries, killing off job openings, and maiming job security.

Equipment to sort recycled plastic is shown at the Repreve Bottle Processing Center, part of the Unifi textile company in Reidsville, N.C. HOW BIG IS THE PROBLEM? American factory production, minus raw materials and some other costs, more than doubled over the same span to $1.91 trillion last year, according to the Commerce Department, which uses 2009 dollars to adjust for inflation For jobs which involve performing predictable physical activities, the researchers say the feasibility of automation is roughly 78 percent. Research shows that the automation of U.S. factories is a much bigger factor than foreign trade in the loss of factory jobs A study at Ball State University's Center for Business and Economic Research last year found that trade accounted for just 13 percent of America's lost factory jobs. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.

Manufacturing is still flourishing, even as machines do increasing amounts of work. Photo via Getty Images WASHINGTON -- Donald Trump blames Mexico and China for stealing millions of jobs from the United States. Would Trump disrupt the economy? This billionaire hopes so Trump says he'll bring jobs back to America. Economists are skeptical Column: Trump's outrage over outsourcing doesn't apply to his own merchandise Despite the Republican presidential nominee's charge that "we don't make anything anymore," manufacturing is still flourishing in America.

Others have a more positive approach and say that AI is just an extension of human thinking that can make intelligent decisions faster than us regular people. Just some days ago, Tieto nominated an AI member on the leadership team of a business unit, called Alicia T. And most of us are already familiar with personal AI assistants such as Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and Google Now. IT security has often been described as a game of cat and mouse. The bad guys try to devise attacks that cannot yet be detected, while the good guys try to figure out beforehand where the next attack could be coming from and hitting to. This is also a playing field where AI is going to play an important role.

Large, white and rather dishy, NASA's latest spacecraft-tracking antenna unveiled on Thursday has an important job ahead of it. Deep Space Station 36 (DSS36) joins NASA's Deep Space Network, in which it will play a role in future interplanetary missions undertaken by humans and robots. Its home, the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex (CDSCC), has a long relationship with the U.S. space agency. In 2015, CDSCC was the first place to hear from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft when it flew close to Pluto. "This antenna is the culmination of what has been a six-and-a-half-year expansion of the tracking station," Glen Nagle, CDSCC's manager of education and public outreach, told Mashable.

This week – a massive investment in the world's first neural prosthetic for human intelligence enhancement, Chinese version of DARPA's Grand Challenge, MIT is ready for Halloween with a horror AI, the self-driving truck delivered a precious cargo of 50 000 beers and more! Bryan Johnson announced he's investing $100M dollars into Kernel, a company that built the world's first neural prosthetic for human intelligence enhancement. Bryan said he did it "in an effort to enhance human intelligence and reimagine our future. Unlocking our brain is the most significant and consequential opportunity in history -- and it's time sensitive." Wired takes a closer look at three teams that were competing at the first Cyborg Olympics – one from exoskeleton race, one from arm prosthetic competition and one that was stimulating paralyzed muscles in a cycling race.

There's a reason Tesla and its competitors use the term "autopilot" for their semi-autonomous cars: Aviation is way ahead of the auto industry when it comes to making machines handle themselves. And yes, the very latest Airbus, Boeings, and F35 fighter jets can pull all sorts of tricks to help the pilot. But the vast majority of the planes in the sky, military and civilian, still rely on humans pilot to manipulate the joysticks and pedals that move their flaps and ailerons. Now, the US Department of Defense says it can make those primitive aircraft, built around cables and pulleys, ready for the age of autonomy--and a robotic arm is part of the answer. Autonomy will prove a crucial feature of 21st century air transportation and warfare, but it's not the easiest thing to add to the current fleet.

Accenture to Help Finnish Immigration Service Deliver Digital Transformation Program HELSINKI; Nov. 2, 2016 - Accenture will help the Finnish Immigration Service (Migri) deliver its Smart Digital Agency program, which is designed to enable the digital transformation of the agency's operations. The program will improve the overall customer experience and introduce innovative digital self-service options for citizens accessing services related to immigration, residency, refugee-related matters and Finnish nationality. Accenture will help Migri enhance its digital capabilities to manage user service requests and to ensure that customer-oriented design thinking remains at the heart of agency activities. Accenture will also help Migri reduce costs and review how the agency streamlines its internal processes, including how information is shared internally and externally with other agencies and state authorities. 'The Finnish immigration service wants to be a pioneer in the delivery of digital public services and to be an example to public service agencies seeking to build their digital capabilities,' said Vesa Hagström, Finnish Immigration Service Development Director.

We all see the early signs of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning-powered solutions in email marketing. A variety of tools can write (or choose) an optimal subject line for you, or determine the correct product or article to feature in order to optimize clicks for a given subscriber. So what does the future hold for email marketing? According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the kinds of "routine" work that can be assisted by machines ("routine cognitive" and "routine manual") have seen flat employment growth, while the kinds of employment that are less routine ("non-routine cognitive" and "non-routine manual") have seen rapid employment growth. A great study by two researchers from Oxford scored a large number of standard professions on their likelihood of being "computerised" by AI. But the study found that data-analysis-heavy professions like market research had a greater chance of being computerized, while less analytic, more "creative" jobs had a lower chance of being outsourced to AI.