Editor's note: Dallas police actively guided an explosive-laden robot to kill gunman Micah Johnson when negotiations broke down after he opened fire on police and others July 7. This interview on Think -- which was recorded before the ambush took place -- focuses on the questions raised by computers and robots programmed to kill without human supervision. You may have seen it earlier this year when a company called Boston Dynamics posted a video of a humanoid robot that can walk on two legs, even over uneven terrain. Seeing a machine balance on bumpy, snowy ground in a New England forest is mesmerizing. But watching the robot get knocked to the ground by a human tester, then get up all by itself and keep going is somehow profoundly unsettling.

I'm Paul Thornton, The Times' letters editor, and it is Saturday, July 16. How much more terrorism can France take? After yet another attack in that country -- this time in Nice, where a driver plowed a truck into a crowd of Bastille Day revelers -- at least 84 people are dead and authorities are busy gathering evidence to determine how it happened. But in the United States, some talking heads seem to possess answers that French investigators have yet to produce. Newt Gingrich, for example, called for government monitoring of mosques, a recommendation that earned him the scorn of The Times' editorial board: In the face of such a threat, people need leaders adept at analyzing data and thinking creatively about intelligence gathering and risk reduction.

NASA plans to send its next rover to Mars in the summer of 2020, so that it arrives on the red planet in February 2021, the space agency said Friday. The "Mars 2020" rover, which borrows a lot of its design features from its wildly successful predecessor Curiosity, has cleared an extensive review process and is now ready to enter the final design and construction phase. "The Mars 2020 rover is the first step in a potential multi-mission campaign to return carefully selected and sealed samples of Martian rocks and soil to Earth," Geoffrey Yoder, acting associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a statement. "This mission marks a significant milestone in NASA's Journey to Mars -- to determine whether life has ever existed on Mars, and to advance our goal of sending humans to the red planet." Mars, despite its inhospitable climate and heavily irradiated surface that would kill humans in a matter of minutes, has been a source of unending fascination for scientists and science fiction writers alike.

New technology could lead humans to relinquish control over decisions to use lethal force. As artificial intelligence advances, the possibility that machines could independently select and fire on targets is fast approaching. Fully autonomous weapons, also known as "killer robots," are quickly moving from the realm of science fiction toward reality. The unmanned Sea Hunter gets underway. At present it sails without weapons, but it exemplifies the move toward greater autonomy.

Deloitte said that around 3.3 million jobs could be classified as business services roles, and that of those, there was a "high chance" that 800,000 to one million jobs would no longer be performed by humans over the period. Simon Barnes, a Deloitte partner, said that the sector's workforce would "fundamentally change over the next 10 to 20 years". Humans are likely to be liberated from "repetitive and highly structured" roles, while new higher-skilled positions are expected to be created to replace them. Mark Carney, the Bank of England Governor, said last month that many of the jobs and industries we are now familiar with "will be gone tomorrow". The rising speed of technological change threatens to make it difficult to choose a career, and for young people to plan their lives, he said.

A researcher at Arizona State University has discovered how to control multiple robotic drones using the human brain. A controller wears a skull cap outfitted with 128 electrodes wired to a computer. If the controller moves a hand or thinks of something, certain areas light up. "I can see that activity from outside," said Panagiotis Artemiadis (pictured above), director of the Human-Oriented Robotics and Control Lab and an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. "Our goal is to decode that activity to control variables for the robots."

A quick visit to the page of Boston Dynamics, a subsidiary of Google, reveals the typical, flowery PR flack pleasantry that is one of the cancers of our age. Our mission is to build the most advanced robots on Earth, with remarkable mobility, agility, dexterity and speed. Surely they're developing robots that will help mankind, right? But if you look at the videos of what they're actually developing, it's easy to see how this type of machinery could soon have frightening military and police applications. Imagine a line of these coming at you, armed with weapons.

The traditional definition of artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to execute tasks and solve problems in ways normally attributed to humans. Some tasks that we consider simple--recognizing an object in a photo, driving a car--are incredibly complex for AI. Machines can surpass us when it comes to things like playing chess, but those machines are limited by the manual nature of their programming; a 30 gadget can beat us at a board game, but it can't do--or learn to do--anything else. This is where machine learning comes in. Show millions of cat photos to a machine, and it will hone its algorithms to improve at recognizing pictures of cats.

The Web app, which is powered partly by artificial intelligence, analyzes posts on social media as well as police radio chatter and feeds of the local airspace in virtually any region. The software, which is linked to IBM's Watson artificial intelligence, combs through tweets and images, specific hashtags and phrases, or posts from or about a particular geographic area and then uses computer algorithms to gauge the mood of that swirling digital conversation. The AI aspects of the iAWACS app only monitor the social media posts -- they don't analyze the audio from police scanners nor from the airspace maps. The result, which the Jester said was still a work in progress, was built from the ground up for law enforcement and intelligence officials with real-time information needs.

Machine intelligence is your firm's primary area of interest. Can you talk about how machine intelligence will make organizations "smarter" and what it'll do to the traditional employer-employee relationship? The intersection of machine intelligence and organizational life is a complex subject about which, today, we know very little. I generally try to avoid predictions, because I think they're mostly lullabies -- stories we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better. I prefer to focus on the unknowns, so we can work to make them known.