Want to uphold the First Order and deal with some rebel scum from your own room? In the same week we've seen the new trailer for The Last Jedi, AI and humanoid robotic company UBTECH has released a new Star Wars Stormtrooper robot. It'll come with an augmented reality app, and can take voice commands, do facial recognition and even sentry patrolling. The First Order Stormtrooper Robot's AR app mode is supported by a voice activated command feature so you can issue direct verbal orders to your robot, launch "attacks" and tackle those pesky rebels through the app interface. Using the facial biometrics feature, you can create a database of up to three faces that your little Stormtrooper responds to with customised interactions.

The accelerating pace of digitization is bringing real, tangible benefits to our society and economy, which we cover daily in the pages on this site. But increased reliance on machine learning algorithms brings its own unique set of risks that threaten to unwind progress and turn people against one another. Three speakers at last week's Strata Data Conference in New York put in all in perspective. The first Strata speaker with a dire warning about the potential for algorithms to go haywire was Cathy O'Neil, who holds a PhD in mathematics from Harvard University and is the founder of the website mathbabe.org. After working as a quant in the finance industry for several years, O'Neil became disenfranchised with the field and how it used data science to rack up profits at customers' expense.

CBS Interactive and VICE Media have good news for us: The future we've all been waiting for – the one we've been increasingly impatient for – has already arrived. The increasingly powerful promises of artificial intelligence, bots, and virtual and augmented reality have been whipping technophiles and pundits alike into something akin to a frenzy, if all those thinkpieces that link current innovations to the magic or sci-fi blockbusters are any indication. And now these companies have paired up to capture that zeitgeist, creating and producing "Dear Future," a long-form journalism series that promises to bring readers dispatches from the cutting edge. In an effort to marry Motherboard's voice with CNET's tech focus, "Dear Future" will tackle the big, science-fiction-becomes-fact stuff. The pledge is a series of stories that demonstrate how today's technology is already impacting our present.

On Wednesday, the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based company is announcing its first smart speaker, the $199 Sonos One, powered by Amazon's Alexa voice assistant. By next year, the company will integrate Alphabet Inc.'s GOOGL 0.86% Google voice assistant, and down the road hopes to make its smart speaker compatible with Apple Inc.'s AAPL -0.06% Siri and others. The partnerships would mean consumers wouldn't need to choose one tech giant's services over another--Sonos could serve them all. The company built a loyal fan base by letting customers play music in every room of a home through a network of wireless speakers that supported streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music. Speakers, though, are no longer just for listening to music.

When you read or hear news stories about the imminent takeover of robots and algorithms that will eliminate jobs for human workers, many times the first examples given are blue-collar jobs like factory workers and taxi drivers. And you may have mentally congratulated yourself because your "professional" job is safe from the threat of being outsourced to computers. But don't feel so safe just yet. More and more, sophisticated algorithms and machine learning are proving that jobs previously thought to be the sole purview of humans can be done -- as well or better -- by machines. Boston Consulting Group has predicted that by 2025 as much as a quarter of jobs currently available will be replaced by either smart software or robots.

Researchers from McGill University, Montreal, have developed an artificial intelligence program (AI) that they believe is one way to put an end to online hate speech. Haji Mohammad Saleem and his team have developed a system that learns hate speech from a data dump that they collected from Reddit between 2006 and 2016, that is 10 years of hate speech from support and abuse groups on the platform, reports Futurism. They were also able to use such data dumps from other sites. Their focus was three major groups who tend to receive a lot of hate – women, African Americans and overweight people. "We then propose an approach to detecting hateful speech that uses content produced by self-identifying hateful communities as training data," wrote the researchers in a release.

Warner Bros.' "Blade Runner 2049" topped the box office charts this weekend, but despite strong reviews and positive audience reaction, ticket sales were estimated at only $31.5 million in the U.S. and Canada, according to the measurement firm ComScore, significantly below analysts' projections. A sequel to Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi cult classic, "Blade Runner," about a futuristic society where androids known as "replicants" are almost indistinguishable from humans, "Blade Runner 2049" had been estimated to pull in $45 million to $50 million in its opening weekend. The film -- directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Ryan Gosling and Jared Leto, with Harrison Ford reprising his role as Deckard -- cost an estimated $150 million to produce after rebates and before marketing costs. The film earned an 89% "fresh" rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and Times critic Kenneth Turan wrote, "this film puts you firmly, brilliantly, unassailably in another world." The film received an A-minus grade from audiences surveyed by CinemaScore.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning used to be heard when the topic was Big Data Analytics – and maybe in some sci-fi movies- before; but now it is impossible to ignore them with the self-driving cars, knowledge navigators... These terms might be quite widespread but they can lead to confusions as they are very much related and being used interchangeably. Artificial intelligence has a longer history than machine learning. It might sound like a new term but we can say it has been studied and improved over the years since Aristotle introduced syllogism, which was a method of formal and mechanical thought. The real birth of the current understanding however starts in the 1940s and 50s with some scientists from mathematics, engineering, psychology, economics and political science who put the idea of'creating an artificial brain' on the table.

"In an era of post-truth politics, driven by the 24-hour news cycle, diminishing trust in institutions, rich visual media, and the ubiquity and velocity of social networked spaces, how do we identify information that is tinted -- information that is incomplete, that may help affirm our existing beliefs or support someone's agenda, or that may be manipulative -- effectively driving a form of propaganda?" (Lotan, Gilad. Over 70 years ago, Karl Polanyi established the term "double movement" Reviewing the most recent developments, politically, economically and socially, one may understand the value of his vision and why his ideas have been increasingly discussed lately. Propaganda 2.0 -- Post-truth politics The Definition of Post-truth politics Adjective: "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief," Why post-truth rhetoric is propaganda This definition not only sounds familiar. The most recent events in global politics give incessant evidence that what is described as an "era" is nothing but history repeating itself. From the economic and social context to commonly used rhetoric.