It's been a hot summer of self-driving car news. Ford announced it's skipping over Level 3 and will put a fleet of Level 4 autonomous vehicles on the road in 2021. Mobileye and Delphi promised Level 4/5 self-drivers by 2019. Sounds exciting--if you have any idea what those numbers mean. Even when they're using words, automakers obfuscate what their cars can do.

AI, and the branch of this discipline called deep learning, crashed the public consciousness on March 9 when Google DeepMind's AlphaGo program beat South Korean champion Lee Se-dol at ancient Chinese game Go. Since then, barely a week has gone by without a fresh breakthrough – or scare story. True AI implies a change in the relationship between machine and human – from predictable task worker reliant on our instructions, to a system which has the capacity to surprise and surpass us. For many, the loss of control inherent in this change is alarming. Hal and Skynet are suddenly too close for comfort.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your thick-necked Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Here we report the untethered operation of a robot composed solely of soft materials. The robot is controlled with microfluidic logic that autonomously regulates fluid flow and, hence, catalytic decomposition of an on-board monopropellant fuel supply.

Ben Dickson is a software engineer and freelance writer. He writes regularly on business, technology and politics. Insider threats are the biggest cybersecurity threats to firms, organizations and government agencies. This is something you hear a lot at security conference keynotes and read about in data breach reports, white papers and surveys -- and these insider threats are becoming increasingly more difficult to detect and prevent, as well as more frequent. This seemingly unstoppable growth accentuates the problem and shortcomings of current solutions, and warrants the need for new defensive technologies to detect and stop the digital daggers aimed at our backs.

I had the pleasure of participating in Milan's FI-WARE VIP Bootcamp (4–6th May, 2016), under invitation by EBAN. There, along with several other investors and entrepreneurs, we assisted 15 startups from all across Europe to improve the structure and the presentation of their VC pitches. One of the people who actively participated, giving their full support to the event (and as a volunteer, nonetheless) was Federico Travella, founder and CEO of NoviCap, an extremely interesting venture in the "fintech" sector that came up with an innovative way of providing working capital for every kind of business. In discussion with Federico and other participants, the topic of AI was brought up, seen as a contributing factor to increasing unemployment, and through that, to social discontent and political instability. It's surely an interesting subject and is connected to the broader issue of technological progress and its social impact.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

In this special guest feature, Cecilia Pizzurro, Senior Director, Strategic Data Projects at LOGICnow, discusses the convergence of data/machine learning and cybersecurity, and the idea that these two are playing off of each other in a more meaningful way than ever before. Cecilia leads a team of data scientists and software engineers in Cambridge (US) and Newcastle (UK). These teams use machine learning and big data analytics to find business value in the vast amount of customer data gathered from LOGICnow's products. She was also the co-founder and CTO of the The Dolomite Group, a South American mining consortium, pioneering machine learning and big data analyses to improve mining efficiency and reduce environmental impact in Peru. This company is currently finalizing its acquisition by a Chilean mining company.

BARCELONA, SPAIN – Newfound enthusiasm for the latest technologies, such as drones and smartphones, to improve the way aid is provided to people in disasters may be overblown, experts warn. The annual World Risk Report from the United Nations University (UNU) highlights the growing interest in new technologies to improve emergency response -- from drones that can survey crisis-hit areas to social media networks that allow survivors to communicate with the wider world. These can provide important information to the logisticians who organize aid delivery or health workers trying to track deadly diseases like Ebola in no-go areas, the report said. But Matthiasƒ Garschagen, a risk management expert with the UNU Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS), said it could not substitute for the basic infrastructure some countries have lacked for decades. "Too many people see technology as the main panacea for solving all the problems you have after disasters strike," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

As more cyber-security threats arise every day, extensive research into prevention and detection schemes is being conducted globally. One of the issues faced is keeping up with the sheer mass of new emerging threats online. Traditional detection schemes are rule or signature based. The creation of a rule or signature relies on prior knowledge of the threats structure, source and operation, making it impossible to stop new threats without prior knowledge. Manually identifying all new and disguised threats is too time-consuming to be humanly possible.

WORLD superpowers are engaged in a feverish "arms race" to develop the first killer robots completely removed from human control, the Sun Online can reveal. These machines will mark a dramatic escalation in computer AI from the drones and robots currently in use, all of which still require a human to press the "kill button". In a series of exclusive interviews, leading experts told The Sun Online machines making life or death decisions will likely be developed within the next 10 years. Fears are now growing about the implications of creating such smart machines, as are concerns they will fall into the hands of terrorist groups such as ISIS. Locked in this new race for military supremacy is Britain, the US, China, Russia and Israel – all of which have robot programmes of varying advancement.