Machines have never replaced humans before, and they probably aren't doing so right now, argues Noah Smith Of all the economic questions being debated today, the most frightening one is, "Will the robots take our jobs?" This nightmare scenario comes in several flavors. The extreme version is that automation simply makes human workers obsolete, just as cars made horses redundant. A less apocalyptic possibility is what economists call "skill-biased technological change" -- people who are technically savvy, mentally flexible and educated will reap greater and greater rewards, while everyone else sees their wages decline. These two scenarios might look different on paper, but the net result is largely the same -- a very big portion of humanity would be either be impoverished or reduced to living off of the government dole.

On this week's Tech Tent - your weekly status update on the technology business - we have three stories reflecting our current anxieties about the nature of our digital world. We'll discuss the biggest cybersecurity threat of the moment, the use of bots in the fight to get the upper hand on social media during the US elections and the ongoing debate about the risks of artificial intelligence. This week, producer Jat Gill and I attended a demo by security firm Sophos which left us both rather scared. James Lyne from the firm played a bad guy launching an attack on a company, while two colleagues played the increasingly confused system administrators trying to work out what was going on as chaos engulfed the network. We then heard that the principle weapon in the attackers' armoury was now ransomware.

"We need you to get out there and -- for once in your life -- focus your indiscriminate rage in a useful direction." Oliver's urging of viewers to exercise their civic rights came during the Federal Communication Commission's public comment period for the pending Net Neutrality rules in 2014, which would have a profound impact on the future development of the Internet. Within hours of the TV show host's rant, the FCC's capacity to accept public comments online crashed, highlighting just how ill-prepared the system was to handle any meaningful level of civic participation. The FCC's comment consideration schedule for Net Neutrality rules consequently was seriously delayed. Six hundred staff lawyers at the Commission subsequently spent nearly nine months to gather, divvy up, read, and categorize what eventually totaled 4 million public responses to the proposed rules, costing taxpayers an estimated 4 million.

Aurora Flight Sciences' Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automantion System (ALIAS), is mounted in the co-pilot seat of a Cessena Caravan aircraft which is preparing for take-off at Manassas Airport in Manassas, Va., Monday, Oct. 17. Government and industry are working together on a robot-like autopilot system that could eliminate the need for a second human pilot in the cockpit. But inside the cockpit, in the right seat, a robot with spindly metal tubes and rods for arms and legs and a claw hand grasping the throttle, was doing the flying. In the left seat, a human pilot tapped commands to his mute colleague using an electronic tablet. The demonstration was part of a Defense Department and industry collaboration that is attempting to replace the second human pilot in two-person flight crews with robot co-pilots that never tire, get bored, feel stressed out or become distracted.

The first autonomous robots to deliver packages straight to your front door won't be flying -- they'll be rolling around on six wheels. Starship Technologies, an Estonia-based startup created by two Skype co-founders, Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla, is slated to begin testing its autonomous delivery robot to bring groceries and restaurant takeout to Washington, D.C., homes and businesses this fall. It's the first U.S. municipality to approve ground-based robots to roll around on city sidewalks. Starship hopes to solve the "last mile" problem –– the work of getting packages from the fulfillment center directly to people's homes -- currently done by humans. It's a problem Amazon wants to solve with drones, but the FAA's rules bar drones from flying around humans without an operator in line of sight.

Politicians have traditionally been very good at masking their emotions when it suits them, but we humans are easy to fool. A machine, on the other hand, might be able to peer through the shroud of deception to get at the true nature of a politician's emotional state. Or at least that's the goal of the project undertaken by four grad students at Columbia University. They built an AI application called "Debate in (E)motion" to watch the recent US Presidential debates to evaluate the emotions of each candidate. The AI isn't listening to what the candidates are saying, and it has no political bias. It is simply extracting a frame from the video every five seconds and scanning for recognizable human emotions.

The most terrifying thing about the most recent cyber attack is that the devices that surround you could be responsible. Your Amazon Echo was so cool until it destroyed Twitter. On Friday, a massive distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) hit Dyn, a company that hosts domain name servers that help users connect to websites. Domain name servers (DNS) are the GPS of the internet, when you type an address into your browser it figures out where the website's data is located. On Friday, they were smashed hard.

A matchmaking service aimed at "sugar daddies" and "sugar babies" is feeling the heat after posting a billboard advertising to undocumented immigrants in Austin, Texas. ArrangementFinders.com, a service that promises to link wealthy older men to young women who are hoping for a financial or other type of arrangement, posted a billboard on Interstate 35 in South Austin reading, "Undocumented immigrant? Before you get deported – get a sugar daddy." Residents are upset about the implication that people would break immigration laws by, presumably, marrying in order to gain citizenship. When asked by ABC affiliate KVUE about the billboard, Kylie Brumley said, ""I think it's really disrespectful to all women and illegal immigrants." Jesse Aguilera said, "To get around getting legalization like that, it's just really offensive." "On a billboard they're encouraging people to commit a federal felony," Thomas Esparza Jr. told Fox 7 Austin. "It's rare that you see a billboard that says, 'Commit a felony.'" Jacob Webster, who was identified as the Chief Marketing Officer for ArrangementFinders.com "I think you're going to have people that are against it, and then you're going to have people that are going to sign up for it," Webster said. ArrangementFinders.com was founded in 2010, and is owned by Avid Life Media, a Toronto-based company that also operates Ashley Madison, the infamous dating website for married people. Cost of membership to ArrangementFinders.com is 79 per month for men, free to women. The two can then meet off-line to determine what kind of "mutually beneficial relationship" they would like to have, according to the website. The site is known for its controversial advertising. In 2014, the company had billboards removed in Chicago and Los Angeles, including one that read, "Because the best job is a b--w job." Webster told Fox 7 that Latinas make up one-third of the women who sign up for ArrangementFinders.com, "How could we speak to this growing demographic for this site in a way where we could get the max effect?" he said. He added that the billboard had been rejected by other locations. "We had a couple approvals, but we got a lot more denials.

In a study published earlier this month in the journal Astrobiology, two researchers say the scientific community should take a closer look at a study of Mars' soil published in 1976. Because two NASA robots may have discovered signs of life on Mars almost four decades ago, say Gilbert Levin from Arizona State University and Patricia Ann Straat from the US National Institutes of Health. It all started when NASA sent two probes, named Viking 1 and Viking 2, to Mars in 1976 to test for signs of life on the Red Planet. As the first spacecraft from Earth to reach Mars, the Viking probes conducted three studies on the planet's biology. To conduct one of the studies, the labed release (LR) experiment, scientists took soil picked up by the Viking probes and mixed it with nutrient-rich water.

Just about every major technology player is investing serious financial and human capital in pursuit of advances in cognitive computing. The National Science and Technology Committee on Technology released a much-anticipated report on how to prepare for the future where we have mature artificial intelligence systems. The report, Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence, outlines specific implications that artificial intelligence will have when it comes to transforming our society and outlines twenty-three recommendations for federal agencies to consider. Computers that think and work like humans will change the nature of our public agencies, from how they are designed and managed to the delivery of public services and the management of public goods. We have good reason to believe that there will be significant benefits to be had from cognitive computing solutions.