Demonstrating our automation system on the UH-1 and the Caravan will prove the viability of our system for both military and commercial applications,

Does it seem like your virtual personal assistant (VPA) knows everything about your life? Microsoft's Cortana can give you reminders, track packages, send emails or texts, keep track of your flights and even remind you to say happy birthday to your cousin next time she calls. According to Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, developers made deliberate design decisions with customers in mind as the company moves into the world of artificial intelligence (AI). "When it comes to AI, the fundamental vision I have is that AI will be infused into everything," Mr. Nadella said in the Mastermind Interview at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2016 in Orlando. "The currency going forward is going to be how to build trust in technology so that people and organizations are comfortable using more technology, and I think that's one of the pressing issues of our time," he said.

Much of the internet appears to be broken. A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack has taken down systems run by Dyn, Inc, one of the largest providers of internet services in the world. And as a result it seems to be causing problems for a variety of websites – including Reddit, Spotify and Twitter. Dyn runs domain name servers or DNS. They work as a phone book or map to the internet, making sure that when someone writes an address into their computer or phone, it can be directed to the right place and show the right information.

Today on In Case You Missed It: The US Air Force is moving its Space Surveillance Telescope to Australia to track space junk littering geosynchronous orbit. That's the orbit 22,000 miles away from our planet where satellites mirror the Earth's rotation so that they don't appear to move. The Department of Justice story about facial recognition is here, while that darling sneezing baby (who eschews costumes) is here. If you enjoy the cartoon humor that is an engine giving up on a job, that's here. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.

With the vital exception of venture capitalist Peter Thiel, tomorrow-focused Silicon Valley tends to see Donald Trump as the candidate of yesterday. Tech workers are demonstrably less than fans of the Republican presidential nominee. Among the many issues at which they find themselves at odds, the real estate/media maven's approach to automation is anathema to the Valley as autonomous cars speed ever closer. "You have a potential candidate in Trump where his entire rhetoric is, 'We're going to bring back all those old jobs, we're not going to go into the future,'" Aaron Levie, CEO and founder of Box, said this week at Vanity Fair's New Establishment Summit in San Francisco. Levie's right: Trump's promise to "bring back" 5 million factory jobs spirited away overseas has been an vital tenet of his campaign.

Last Thursday, I had the honor to be one of the warmup acts for President Obama at the White House Frontiers Conference at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Here is the prepared text and slides from the talk I delivered there. As you'll see if you watch the video, what I ended up saying isn't exactly what I had written out in advance, but it is reasonably close. Let me know if you like this format for sharing talks.) Hearing that Bob Dylan just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, how could I not begin this talk with his famous line, "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"

In the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in a corner of South Carolina sits a town that should be economically dead. For decades, Greenville was the heart of the state's textile industry--and its economic engine. First attracted by the area's fast-moving rivers as a way to power looms, textile manufacturers employed tens of thousands of people here. Beginning in the 1970s, however, facing competition from lower-cost manufacturing regions like Mexico and Southeast Asia, these companies began to struggle. Over the next decades, many factories closed.

It's no secret that President Obama is a blerd--a big-time sci-fi buff and a huge proponent of advancing STEM. He just served as guest editor of popular geek'zine Wired's November issue. President Obama launched a number of STEM-related initiatives and at his most recent event, the White House Frontiers Conference, revealed specifics on how the United States will push technology and innovation. At the conference, held in Pittsburgh last week, the Obama administration announced that 300 million would go toward science, technology, and innovation. The investment is "to develop the industries of the future and harness science and technology to help address important challenges," according to a press release issued by The White House.

Speaking to robots, asking the Google Assistant for directions, using Amazon Alexa to lock the front door. Those things reveal the current state of artificial intelligence--a human powered endeavor with some assistance. Soon, it will all seem like the Dark Ages. Tesla has decided to radically improve how A.I. automates our lives. Announced late last night during the Presidential debates, the new Enhanced Autopilot will work in future cars in the Tesla line-up, depending on regulatory approval.

In May, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced "a new series of workshops and an interagency working group to learn more about the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence." They hosted a June Workshop on Safety and Control for AI (videos), along with three other workshops, and issued a general request for information on AI (see MIRI's primary submission here). The OSTP has now released a report summarizing its conclusions, "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence," and the result is very promising. The OSTP acknowledges the ongoing discussion about AI risk, and recommends "investing in research on longer-term capabilities and how their challenges might be managed": General AI (sometimes called Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI) refers to a notional future AI system that exhibits apparently intelligent behavior at least as advanced as a person across the full range of cognitive tasks. A broad chasm seems to separate today's Narrow AI from the much more difficult challenge of General AI. Attempts to reach General AI by expanding Narrow AI solutions have made little headway over many decades of research.