Before Chris White could help disrupt Jihadi finance networks, crush weapons markets, and bust up sex-slave rings with search tools that mine the dark Web, he first had to figure out how to stop himself from plummeting through the open gun door of a banking Black Hawk helicopter. White was on his way to a forward operating base outside Kabul headquarters, as part of a secret intelligence cell to help confront the Taliban and al-Qaida, smash their encrypted online money stream, and win over the hearts and minds of the Afghanistan population. Slight and lanky and 28, White felt Dukakis-ridiculous in his unwieldy body armor and bulbous helmet with "Dr. White" scrawled in marker on duct tape across the front, and with the dust from liftoff, he was finding it hard to breathe. He was still struggling with the unfamiliar seat straps when the pilot hit the stick, sending White sliding toward the hot square of the door and the desert 200 feet below. Down there, Afghanistan was a messy, dangerous place for pretty much everybody. After nearly a decade of U.S.-led war, the American body count had hit 1,000, and civilian casualties were beyond calculation, as President Obama's 30,000-troop surge intensified the fighting that spring. Many feared the situation was only going from bad to worse. The U.S. was escalating drone strikes across the border in Pakistan. And U.S. command was under assault after Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the surge's architect, found himself without a job after he and his staff made disparaging remarks about the commander in chief in some music magazine. It is hard to imagine that only a few weeks earlier, White had been just another impossibly young-looking Harvard postdoc in flip-flops looking forward to a Cambridge summer. Helicopter gunships and war zones weren't on the radar; there were lattes in the square and rock climbing, and on the other side of campus, a prestigious fellowship in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where he was working at the intersection of big data, statistics, and machine learning. He had earned academic pole position and had every expectation it would continue that way forever -- becoming a professor, building a lab, and sniping out white papers from a tenured ivory tower.

For thousands of years humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people. Jean-Jacques Rousseau summed up this revolution in Emile, his 1762 treatise on education. When looking for the rules of conduct in life, Rousseau found them "in the depths of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing can efface. I need only consult myself with regard to what I wish to do; what I feel to be good is good, what I feel to be bad is bad." Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all.

No one will read what your bot has to say. At best, they will skim it and move on. You challenge is to take something complex and boil it down to a few crucial words -- and to make those words so powerful that the message sticks to the user like glue. Your chatbot should have a single-minded focus, and anything that does not adhere to this focus should be stripped away. Have you ever wondered why Donald Trump won the Republican primary?

The Pentagon is developing its own'AI soldier drones' that can hunt down the enemy and even fly inside buildings to give military bosses a look inside. A 1m Army award, awarded through a new Pentagon tech-focused'Defense Innovation Unit Experimental' project, is for a nine-month'prototype project in the area of Autonomous Tactical Airborne Drones'. It will work with a secretive firm called Shield AI to develop the systems. One of Shield AI#'s drones in action: It can create a 3D map of a room and send it back to controllers. It is believed the units could be sent into buildings by special forces soldiers to create 3D maps, one of which is shown here.

This article was originally published by the World Economic Forum. The doomsday scenarios spun around this theme are so outlandish--like The Matrix, in which human-created artificial intelligence plugs humans into a simulated reality to harvest energy from their bodies--it's difficult to visualize them as serious threats. Meanwhile, artificially intelligent systems continue to develop apace. Self-driving cars are beginning to share our roads; pocket-sized devices respond to our queries and manage our schedules in real-time; algorithms beat us at Go; robots become better at getting up when they fall over. It's obvious how developing these technologies will benefit humanity. But, then, don't all the dystopian sci-fi stories start out this way?

If your drone weighs more than 250 grams, airlines and pilots think you should get a drone pilots' license before you fly it in the European Union. They're worried about the number of near misses between drones and helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft, and they see greater regulation of drone use as the best way to improve safety. They also want more tests to be conducted to determine the damage that drones may cause to manned aircraft, much as is already done to reduce the threat of bird strikes. In a letter signed by 10 international associations for airlines, pilots, airports, and other organizations, they make little distinction between commercial and leisure uses of drones. All drones should be registered at the time of purchase or resale, they said, because knowing the devices can be traced is likely to make pilots behave more responsibly.

Imagine it's 2018 and some scientists from NASA are at the White House to see President Clintrump. There's a piece of space coming toward us; it is rocky, and icy, and big, and the risk of it hitting the Earth is much larger than anyone is comfortable with. Even if there's time to act, there won't be much of it. Where did it come from? How come we didn't spot it until now? What's the best course of action to take?

Imagine custom shirts and shoes at mass production prices with same day delivery; imagine turbine parts produced at the airport where and when they are needed; imagine a new tooth made while you're in the dentist chair. The age of smart local manufacturing is just around the corner. Often called Industry 4.0, this new wave manufacturing incorporated connected devices (internet of things: IoT), cloud computing and machine learning. The term Industry 4.0 originated in 2011 with German government-funded research on advanced manufacturing. The second industrial revolution was mass production, starting around 1870, but best known for the assembly lines of Henry Ford 1913.

Artificial intelligence--the kind where robots understand a wide number of human concepts--has been a military focus for decades, and scientists in Japan may have just made a college-ready AI. For the first time, a Japanese artificial intelligence program has scored above average on a national standardized college entry exam, performing well enough to have an 80 percent likelihood of getting into 33 national universities, according to the National Institute of Informatics, or NII. The AI program scored 511 points out of 950 on the National Center Test for University Admissions (similar to the SATs), with a particularly strong performance in math and history, and well above the national average of 416. It was a first for the program, which performed less well in 2013 and 2014, according to the Wall Street Journal. NII announced the breakthrough on Saturday.

Imagine custom shirts and shoes at mass production prices with same day delivery; imagine turbine parts produced at the airport where and when they are needed; imagine a new tooth made while you're in the dentist chair. The age of smart local manufacturing is just around the corner. Often called Industry 4.0, this new wave manufacturing incorporated connected devices (internet of things: IoT), cloud computing and machine learning. The term Industry 4.0 originated in 2011 with German government-funded research on advanced manufacturing. The second industrial revolution was mass production, starting around 1870, but best known for the assembly lines of Henry Ford 1913.