The US government has launched an investigation into the safety of automaker Tesla's autonomous driving system after what may be the world's first known death involving "self-driving" technology. A driver of a Tesla Model S car operating the system, which is called Autopilot, was killed in a collision with a truck two months ago, prompting the probe, which was disclosed on Thursday. The investigation comes as Tesla and other automakers are gearing up to offer systems that allow vehicles to drive themselves under certain conditions across a wide range of vehicles over the next few years. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it was now investigating 25,000 Model S sedans that were equipped with Autopilot. The accident, according to a report from the Florida Highway Patrol, killed Joshua Brown on a clear, dry roadway on May 7 in the state of Florida.

As government services move online, chatbots may be able to help answer citizen questions. So far, actual government examples are still rare, but speakers at a recent event stressed that the potential use cases are real and widespread. At the DigitalGov University event, "Automatic for the People: AI, Machine Learning and Chatbots for Digital Customer Service in Government" at the General Services Administration headquarters June 28, panelists discussed how advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, including bots, can expand and improve digital customer service. As more people are using government services online -- and asking questions about those services via digital channels -- the number of daily online queries to some agencies have already hit hundreds per day. "What happens when it becomes thousands of questions a day?" Justin Herman, the lead for open government at GSA's Technology Transformation Service, asked.

Tesla announced today that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation into a recent fatal crash of a Model S with the company's Autopilot feature activated. The accident took place on May 7th in a small West Florida town called Williston. The Florida Highway Patrol is also conducting its own investigation of the accident, according to a public affairs officer there. The same officer reported that Tesla has, since the fatal accident in May, sent engineers down to Ocala, Florida to assist investigators in accessing data they needed to evaluate the causes of the crash. Tesla offered an account of the event in a blog post titled "A Tragic Loss" that went up today, detailing the crash, an "extremely rare circumstance," which occurred on a divided highway.

The Stanford campus has been buzzing this week over the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit, which kicked off here yesterday. This three-day event unites an estimated 1,500 entrepreneurs, academics and investors from around the world in a series of talks and panels designed to spark new ideas and partnerships. As part of the summit, Stanford and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy are presenting a panel discussion tonight to explore the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence. Among the featured experts at "The Future of Artificial Intelligence: Emerging Topics and Societal Benefit" will be bioengineer Russ Altman, MD, PhD, faculty director of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, and Fei-Fei Li, PhD, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford Vision Lab. Earlier this week Altman, who is also a professor of genetics and medicine, provided a sneak peek of some of the things we'll likely hear about tonight: This is a great opportunity for AI to help advance our understanding of health and disease.

In this June 1, 2016 photo, a worker adjusts a welding robot at a subsidiary of China Offshore Oil Engineering Co. Ltd. in Qingdao in eastern China's Shandong province. An official survey of Chinese manufacturing release Friday, July 1, 2016, shows that activity was flat in June, signaling further weakness in the world's No. 2 economy as it undergoes a prolonged slowdown.

Better Together is slightly tongue-in-cheek, too, but Kershaw said it's a way to support the Remain cause, though it's probably too late. The morning after the referendum, Kershaw and his team of about six had woken up feeling "miserable." "We've got Europe in our DNA; half my family are French, we've got staff here on an EU visa, and some of us are the children of immigrants," Kershaw told me over email. "I wanted something to cheer us up."' The Android app launched Thursday morning, and Kershaw hopes an iOS app will become available next week.

Critics have taken issue with Trump's portrayal of trade as the ultimate boogeyman. While it's true that manufacturing is in rapid decline -- with 4.5 million manufacturing jobs lost since NAFTA took effect in 1994 -- it's not easy to assign blame. In a report last year, the Congressional Research Service concluded that NAFTA's effect on the nation's economy "appears to have been relatively small." Technology is likely the bigger culprit for job losses; robots and other machines make it possible to produce more with fewer workers.

Could Kevin Bacon have saved us from the 2008 financial crisis? But the network science behind six degrees of Kevin Bacon just well may have. According to the famous saying, every movie actor is separated from Kevin Bacon by six degrees of separation or less, going from co-star to co-star (actually most are separated from Bacon by only three degrees). Actors form a "small-world" network, meaning it takes a surprisingly small number of connections to get from any one member to any other. Natural and man-made small-world networks of all kinds are extremely common: The electric power grid of the western United States, the neural network of the nematode worm C. elegans, the Internet, protein and gene networks in biology, citations in scientific papers, and most social networks are small. Most of these small networks use hubs, or nodes with an especially large number of links to other nodes.

Federal regulators are investigating Tesla's autopilot feature after a fatal crash involving a tractor trailer and one of its Model S cars. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened the investigation after a man was killed while driving a Model S with the self-driving mode engaged. "This is the first known fatality in just over 130 million miles where Autopilot was activated," Tesla said in a statement Thursday. It called the incident a "tragic loss." The car was on a divided highway when a tractor trailer apparently turned in front of it.

These are my notes and observations after attending the Safety in Artificial Intelligence (SafArtInt) conference, which was co-hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Carnegie Mellon University on June 27 and 28. This isn't an organized summary of the content of the conference; rather, it's a selection of points which are relevant to the control problem. As a result, it suffers from selection bias: it looks like superintelligence and control-problem-relevant issues were discussed frequently, when in reality those issues were discussed less and I didn't write much about the more mundane parts. SafArtInt has been the third out of a planned series of four conferences. The purpose of the conference series was twofold: the OSTP wanted to get other parts of the government moving on AI issues, and they also wanted to inform public opinion. The other three conferences are about near term legal, social, and economic issues of AI. SafArtInt was about near term safety and reliability in AI systems.