The security robots are made by a company called Knightscope, located in Mountain View. The K5 version uses lasers, thermal imaging sensors, 360 video, air quality sensors, a microphone and various other technologies to deter and detect criminal activities. In the event of suspicious activity, the robot alerts local human authorities. Stacy Dean Stephens, Knightscope vice president of marketing and sales, told NBC Bay Area that the company does not think the robots are dangerous. "This is a horrific accident, but we believe the technology and the machines are incredibly safe and we will continue to do our best to make sure that they are," Stephens said.

In this Dec. 17, 2014 file photo, a Pakistan army soldier inspects the Army Public School that was attacked a day before by Taliban gunmen, in Peshawar, Pakistan. The Pakistani army said Wednesday, July 13, 2016 that the mastermind of the 2014 attack on an army-run school has been killed in a U.S. drone strike. A Pakistani military spokesman says that a U.S. Army general confirmed the death of Taliban leader Khalifa Umar Mansoor in a phone call to Pakistan's army chief.

Ben Dickson is a software engineer and freelance writer. He writes regularly on business, technology and politics. The transportation industry is associated with high maintenance costs, disasters, accidents, injuries and loss of life. Hundreds of thousands of people across the world are losing their lives to car accidents and road disasters every year. According to the National Safety Council, 38,300 people were killed and 4.4 million injured on U.S. roads alone in 2015.

Last week New York University hosted the final workshop of a series sponsored by the White House on the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence. Rather than focusing on the technical bits and bytes, the NYU-hosted schedule centered around the near-term social and economic impact of automation, mass data collection and new analytics. This leads directly into the White House's July 22nd deadline for its Request for Information on "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence." While we often fantasize about the fallout from the coming robot apocalypse, that is simply not today's challenge. Today, we need to focus on the near-term impact of smart-er automation systems on labor and social structures.

Dallas Police face questions this morning over the method used to kill the sniper in last week's officer ambush. Police sent a robot armed with explosives to kill the gunman. Robots in the past have stopped a lot of dangerous situations. They can do pretty much anything a person can do: go upstairs, communicate via speakers, and use cameras to explore a scene, and at least one has been deployed to spray tear gas to subdue a suspect. But using a robot to kill?

Renewable power sources such as wind now provide about one-third of Germany's electricity. The rows of towering wind turbines and legions of glistening solar panels spread across Germany's landscape are striking emblems of the country's shift to non-nuclear, low-carbon power. But although Germany is the world's poster child for renewable energy, its grids cannot yet cope with the erratic nature of wind and solar power. In June, German meteorologists, engineers and utility firms began to test whether big data and machine learning can make these power sources more grid-friendly. "To operate the grid more efficiently and keep fossil reserves at a minimum, operators need to have a better idea of how much wind and solar power to expect at any given time," says Malte Siefert, a physicist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy System Technology in Kassel, Germany, and a leader on the project, called EWeLiNE.

There is a need for a new global platform to monitor, consider, and make recommendations about the implications of emerging technologies in general, and AI more specifically, for international security. The doomsday scenarios spun around this theme are so outlandish – like The Matrix, in which human-created artificial intelligence plugs humans into a simulated reality to harvest energy from their bodies – it's difficult to visualize them as serious threats. Meanwhile, artificially intelligent systems continue to develop apace. Self-driving cars are beginning to share our roads; pocket-sized devices respond to our queries and manage our schedules in real-time; algorithms beat us at Go; robots become better at getting up when they fall over. It's obvious how developing these technologies will benefit humanity. But, then – don't all the dystopian sci-fi stories start out this way?

YOKOHAMA – Nissan Motor Co. on Wednesday unveiled its new Serena model minivan featuring self-driving technology. The van, which goes on sale next month, includes some autonomous capabilities that allow it to control steering, gas and brakes on single-lane highways, regardless of traffic conditions, Nissan said. The technology is called Propilot, which monitors road conditions using a 360-degree camera. That information is analyzed by a computer, which then controls the vehicle. Nissan is the first among Japanese automakers to release a vehicle equipped with autonomous driving technology that deals with highway traffic jams, the company said.

Another accident involving Tesla's autopilot system has been reported, this time in Montana when a Model X veered off the road and hit a post. Early on Sunday morning on a highway near Whitehall, a Tesla veered off to the right into a wooden guardrail, according to the Detroit Free Press, stopping the car before it left the road. The driver told a highway patrol officer that the car's driver assist feature had been engaged. Tesla on Tuesday said data suggested that the driver's hands were not on the wheel when the accident occurred. The company confirmed that the driver had enabled autosteer on an undivided mountain road, a Tesla spokesperson said in a short statement, adding that it is looking into the crash. "No force was detected on the steering wheel for over two minutes after autosteer was engaged," Tesla said, adding that it was contrary to the system's terms of use.

The K5 robot stands 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighs 300 pounds. Robots make cheap security guards, but they don't necessarily make the best security guards. Last week, a guard robot at Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California, collided with a 16-month-old and kept driving. It amuses shoppers of all ages, but last Thursday, 16-month-old Harwin Cheng had a frightening collision with the robot. "The robot hit my son's head and he fell down facing down on the floor and the robot did not stop and it kept moving forward," Harwin's mom Tiffany Teng said.