At Def Con, seven AI bots were pitted against one another in a game of capture the flag. The DARPA-sponsored event was more than just a fun exercise for hackers. It was meant to get more researchers and companies to focus on autonomous artificial intelligence. As part of the Department of Defense (DoD), DARPA is tasked with making sure the United States is at the forefront of this emerging field. While the country may currently be mired in a ground wars against insurgents and extremist groups, the DoD is looking at future skirmishes. The department's long-term artificial intelligence plans are focused more on conflicts with countries like Russia, China and North Korea than terrorism.

From picking our favorite restaurants to predicting weather and correcting global food shortages, artificial intelligence is already augmenting everyday life. Firmly rooted in the realm of science fiction, artificial intelligence (AI) has often felt external – something happening out there. In reality, AI is a huge part of our everyday lives. We just don't recognize it. Bank alerts of suspected fraudulent charges, smartphone notifications to exercise, Siri or Cortana's ability to recognize voices – are all examples of AI. "Artificial intelligence is basically where machines make sense, learn, interface with the external world, without human beings having to specifically program it," said Nidhi Chappell, director of machine learning at Intel. AI improves lives in many other areas too.

After robot cars and robot rescue workers, US research agency Darpa is turning its attention to robot hackers. Best known for its part in bringing the internet into being, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency has more recently brought engineers together to tackle what it considers to be "grand challenges". These competitions try to accelerate research into issues it believes deserve greater attention - they gave rise to serious work on autonomous vehicles and saw the first stumbling steps towards robots that could help in disaster zones. Next is a Cyber Grand Challenge that aims to develop software smart enough to spot and seal vulnerabilities in other programs before malicious hackers even know they exist. "Currently, the process of creating a fix for a vulnerability is all people, and it's a process that's reactive and slow," said Mike Walker, head of the Cyber Grand Challenge at Darpa. This counted as a grand challenge, he said, because of the sheer complexity of modern software and the fundamental difficulty one computer had in understanding what another was doing - a problem first explored by computer pioneer Alan Turing.

An Uber driver sits in his car near San Francisco International Airport on July 15, 2015. Uber and Volvo will invest a combined 300 million into a joint project to develop self-driving vehicles, the companies announced Thursday. In a statement, the companies said they will equip base vehicles with autonomous driving technology, ultimately moving toward manufacturing self-driving vehicles. Volvo will make the vehicles, while Uber purchases those vehicles and implement its own self-driving tech. "Over one million people die in car accidents every year," said Uber CEO Travis Kalanick in a statement.

For nearly a quarter of a century, this organization has championed a specific way of thinking about tomorrow. If it's true, as the writer William Gibson once had it, that the future is already here, just unevenly distributed, then our task has been to locate the places where various futures break through to our present and identify which one we hope for. Our founders--Louis Rossetto, Jane Metcalfe, and Kevin Kelly--all supported a strain of optimistic libertarianism native to Silicon Valley. The future they endorsed was the one they saw manifested in the early Internet: one where self-organizing networks would replace old hierarchies. To them, the US government was one of those kludgy, inefficient legacy systems that mainly just get in the way.

Denmark has a problem: it may soon be unable to afford offering such a good deal to its people. Free health care for all, a 757 monthly stipend for college students and robust safety nets for the less fortunate all cost money – Denmark devotes slightly more than 30 percent of its gross domestic product to social spending, one of the highest levels in the rich world. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, such a "generous welfare system requires robust public finances." And while Denmark's "seem sustainable" for now, the assumptions that underpin that view carry a high level of uncertainty, the OECD warned in a recent survey. True, an unemployment rate below 4 percent is one of Europe's lowest, and industry frequently complains about shortages in skilled labor.

Machine learning has been a hot topic in cybersecurity circles lately. The cybersecurity sector generates oceans of data. Sorting through threat data to glean useful intelligence is a huge task, akin to finding a needle in a proverbial "needlestack." The first level of sorting is definitely beyond human manual capabilities--but it's perfect for a digital workhorse. Modern computers are terrific at crunching data, recognizing patterns and showing basic trends.

A new astronaut will join the roster to help facilitate man's first trip to Mars. Nasa is recruiting teams to develop and display the ability of a Robonaut 5 (R5) robot with a series of tasks that could save astronauts' lives in space. Called Space Robotics Challenge, the million dollar contest will create an AI robot to act as an astronaut's assistant. Nasa has launched a competition encouraging teams to develop and display the ability of a Robonaut 5 robot (pictured) with a series of tasks in a virtual environment. Each team's R5 will be will be challenged with resolving the aftermath of a dust storm that has damaged a Martian habitat.

NASA's six foot, 300-pound humanoid robot is looking for a programmer. This week, NASA announced the start of the Space Robotics Challenge, a 1 million contest to program a virtual robot. Competing teams will be tasked with programming Robonaut 5, a humanoid robot, how to perform damage control after a Martian dust storm that has damaged a habitat. As part of this, they'll need to use the robot to complete three objectives: align a communications dish, repair a solar array, and fix a leak in the hab. Registration is open now, with the final round of competition held in June 2017. Robonaut also goes by the name Valkyrie at MIT, which we first met in 2013 as a DARPA challenge entrant.

Video of Old Jefferson neighborhood at Barringer Rd.Park, captured by drone Tuesday morning, August 16th, 2016. When the water rises, what can you do? When torrential rains led to massive flooding in Louisiana, the floodwaters displaced thousands of people. Getting to shelter is the most important thing, but for many, the most urgent question on their mind once they found somewhere to wait out the storm was finding out if their home is still underwater. That's a hard thing to do remotely.