Are you skeptical about machines' ability to effectively aid social science decision making? Machines are becoming ever more intelligent, increasingly able to help humans make decisions across the social science spectrum, but cognitive computing is still in its infancy, with much unexplored ground ahead. Accordingly, government leaders who harness the power of cognitive computing are helping usher in a renaissance of simplified operations and enhanced constituent engagement. The secret to effectively using cognitive computing to aid human decision making lies in teaching computers to ask the right questions while taking account context and staying focused on what computers do well. Computers operate at great speed.

The head of Britain's digital espionage agency has apologized for the organization's historic prejudice against homosexuals, saying it failed to learn from the treatment of World War II codebreaker Alan Turing. In a rare public speech, GCHQ chief Robert Hannigan told a gathering organized by the rights group Stonewall that the agency's ban on homosexuals had caused long-lasting psychological damage to many and hurt the agency because talented people were excluded from working there. "The fact that it was common practice for decades reflected the intolerance of the times and the pressures of the Cold War, but it does not make it any less wrong and we should apologize for it," Hannigan said Friday at the conference organized by Stonewall, which campaigns for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality. The speech offered a poignant tribute to Turing, the gay computer science pioneer and architect of the effort to crack Nazi Germany's Enigma cipher. Turing was convicted of indecency in 1952 and stripped of his security clearance.

The bad news is, Japan is beset by seemingly insoluble problems. The good news is the word "seemingly." No nation whose rise to economic superpowerdom began a bare decade after being bombed to rubble in history's most destructive war will ever find anything truly "insoluble." Give it 34 years, says Clyde Prestowitz. His name rings bells in Japan -- alarm bells mostly, because Prestowitz, an American labor economist who served in the 1980s as economic adviser to the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, earned notoriety here as a prime "Japan basher."

With the swift acceleration of artificial intelligence and automated technology, there are growing concerns around the development of so-called killer robots. Unlike drones and other technologies that are controlled remotely by humans, lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) could operate independently in military missions. Proponents say with proper safeguards it could actually save lives, but critics say they will lead to an arms race and even threaten humanity. Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan of Non-Violence International said while automated machines may work well on factory floors, they have no place on the battlefield. "War is an unstructured space," she said.

Peace groups are pushing the Liberal government to play a lead role in crafting a global ban on "killer robots." Canadian government and civilian officials were at a United Nations disarmament conference in Geneva this week for the third round of talks on whether to outlaw lethal autonomous weapons systems. With the swift acceleration of artificial intelligence and automated technology, there are growing concerns around the development of so-called killer robots. Unlike drones and other technologies that are controlled remotely by humans, lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) could operate independently in military missions. Proponents say with proper safeguards it could actually save lives, but critics say they will lead to an arms race and even threaten humanity.

You have a fever, can't eat and you're barely strong enough to get out of bed. So you phone your GP surgery for an appointment, only to be told that the first one is two weeks away. A mobile app, Your.MD, is promising something radically different. Billed as a personal health assistant, it uses artificial intelligence (AI) to mimic, as far as possible, your consultation with a GP. If you tell Your.MD your symptoms, it will tell you what it thinks your problem might be.

Daniel Kottke is a regular among familiar eucalyptus groves outside Stanford University's Frost Amphitheater, seeing the Dead there whenever he gets the chance. Into the '80s, the venue remains a picnic ground for Stanford research scientists and Silicon Valley characters old and new, conspiring on various levels of future building. Apple founder Steve Jobs accepts the acid from Daniel Kottke, and they go their separate ways. Spontaneously, Daniel offers his old friend a few hits of Windowpane he has in his pocket. "An old-times gesture," Daniel says.

Does predictability provide an overriding concept and perhaps a metric for evaluating when LAWS are acceptable or when they might be unacceptable under international humanitarian law? Arguably, if the behavior of an autonomous weapon is predictable, deploying it might be considered no different from, for example, launching a ballistic missile. This, of course, presumes that we can know how predictable the behavior of a specific autonomous weapon will be. Over the past two years, this body has focused upon ethical and legal challenges to LAWS. In addition, there are contentions that autonomous weaponry will fail to perform as expected, will behave unpredictably on occasion, and are therefore inherently risky and liable to commit acts that violate IHL, even when this is not the intention of those who deploy the systems.

Soft robots that can grasp delicate objects, computer algorithms designed to spot an "insider threat," and artificial intelligence that will sift through large data sets -- these are just a few …

It is a federal crime to shoot down aircraft, and this week, the FAA confirm that that includes drones. This is great news for anyone who has a drone, and for anyone who doesn't want errant bullets falling from the sky, and it's bad news for anyone eager to pump a quadcopter full of lead. From Forbes' John Goglia, who confirmed this with the FAA: According to the FAA "regardless of the situation, shooting at any aircraft -- including unmanned aircraft -- poses a significant safety hazard. An unmanned aircraft hit by gunfire could crash, causing damage to persons or property on the ground, or it could collide with other objects in the air. To reach this justification, the FAA turned to 18 U.S.C. 32, a law that in part expands "United States jurisdiction over aircraft sabotage to include destruction of any aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States."