There have been two recent incidents involving Tesla's semi-autonomous driving feature, called Autopilot, which may give consumers are reason to be concerned. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating the death of Joshua Brown, who died from injuries sustained when his 2015 Tesla Model S crashed while in Autopilot mode on May 7 in Florida. On May 8, the driver of a 2016 Tesla Model X on Friday was injured in a crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike when it hit a guardrail and rolled onto roof while using the car's semi-autonomous Autopilot system, The Detroit Free Press reports.

When a police robot is used to kill, one has to ask if we are at a tipping point. The dangerous events in Dallas, in which 12 policemen were shot, made it seem permissible to repurpose a robot to apply lethal force. When an armed suspect refused to surrender, a Remotec robot armed with plastic explosives was dispatched to kill him. This wasn't Robocop and it didn't operate autonomously. It was a bomb disposal robot remotely controlled by police officers.

Back in December of 2015, Beijing city government issued its first red alert to signal that air pollutant levels were significant enough to cause risk to human health. As part of active red alert protocols, the city demands that automobile usage be reduced by 50%, and that heavy-load vehicles like garbage trucks and semis be banned from the road. This, in turn, slows local business, industry, and commerce to a near grinding halt. Flight cancellations are another common and undesirable side effect of these red alert transportation restrictions. Even worse still, however, are the ways in which this level of air pollution is affecting human health throughout Beijing and China at-large.

Federal safety investigators are asking electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc. for details on how its Autopilot system works and why it failed to detect a tractor-trailer that crossed its path in a Florida crash. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in a letter to Tesla posted Tuesday, also requests data on all crashes that happened because Tesla's system did not work as expected. The agency is investigating the May 7 crash in Williston, Fla., that killed 40-year-old Joshua Brown, of Canton, Ohio. Tesla has said the cameras on Brown's Model S sedan failed to distinguish the white side of a turning tractor-trailer from a brightly lit sky and didn't automatically brake. The agency gave Tesla until Aug. 26 to fully comply with its request.

The U.S. government has asked Tesla Motors for detailed information about key safety systems on its cars after a May 7 crash in which a driver was killed while traveling in autonomous mode. In the accident, a Tesla Model S in autopilot mode failed to recognize a truck being driven across the highway in front of it and slammed into it. The roof of the car was torn off and the driver was killed. In a letter sent to Palo Alto-based Tesla Motors, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is asking for details of all incidents in which automatic emergency braking was initiated and automatic steering warnings were recorded. The NHTSA says it is asking for the information as part of an investigation into "all crashes alleged to have occurred because forward collision warning or automatic emergency braking did not occur when expected."

Over the past few months Google, Microsoft and Facebook have taken major decisions to make their artificial intelligence APIs openly available to all. IBM have opened their Watson API on a'freemium' basis and Elon Musk launched the OpenAI project with a star-studded list of backers; Palantir CEO Peter Thiel, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Y Combinator president Sam Altman. These hugely powerful tools, which are used, developed and backed by the world's most advanced technology companies, are now available to anyone with the skills to use them. Whilst these announcements haven't quite drawn the media attention of an iPhone launch, their significance and reach may be far greater. The point is this: using these toolkits, individually or combined, anyone can integrate transformational AI or machine learning platforms - which are as sophisticated as anything currently on the market - to their business at on a pay as you go or free basis.

When a police robot is used to kill, one has to ask if we are at a tipping point. The dangerous events in Dallas, in which 12 policemen were shot, made it seem permissible to repurpose a robot to apply lethal force. When an armed suspect refused to surrender, a Remotec robot armed with plastic explosives was dispatched to kill him. This wasn't Robocop and it didn't operate autonomously. It was a bomb disposal robot remotely controlled by police officers.

To compare where the humans and machines looked, the researchers created "attention" heat maps that could be laid over one another. On a scale of 0 to 1, where 0 is no overlap at all and 1 is complete overlap, the researchers found that the attention maps from the humans lined up at a rate of 0.63. But when comparing humans to machines, this figure was just 0.26. Explaining this difference is tricky. In one question in the study, for example, the humans and neural networks where shown a picture of a bedroom, and asked: "What is covering the windows?"

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. on Tuesday unveiled a robot that can operate in the presence of flammable gases, such as after a gas leak following a disaster. A joint project with Chiba Institute of Technology, the Sakura No. 2 is the country's first mobile inspection unit that can operate in the presence of high concentrations of explosive gases such as methane and hydrogen. There is an increasing need for an inspection robot that is not a fire hazard as Japan steers toward becoming a hydrogen-based society, said Ken Onishi, a senior engineer in charge of the project for Mitsubishi Heavy. "There was a debate over whether to develop robots that can operate near hydrogen gas, as doing so requires an extremely high level of technology," Onishi said. "As we may encounter accidents such as collisions involving hydrogen cars or a truck loaded with hydrogen tanks rolling over inside a road tunnel, we decided to develop a robot that can deal with such situations."

Investigations by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board into accidents involving the company's Autopilot technology might suggest as much. In an industry that can seem ridiculously old-fashioned and slow-moving, it may be hard to know just how far to push. And Tesla has forged a remarkable success story by taking risks and breaking the conventions of carmaking with new technologies. With all the excitement over electric vehicles, self-driving technologies, and Uber-like apps, it can be easy to forget that the car industry is more than 100 years old, and nearly impossible for a startup to break into. It is fiercely competitive and is built on razor-thin margins.