This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Last week, the Dallas police killed a suspected gunman with a bomb-delivering robot. It was a desperate measure for desperate times: five law enforcement officers were killed and several more wounded before the shooter was finally cornered. Of course, the shooter needed to be stopped; preventing further murder and mayhem is always a priority. But the method, a robot bomb, was so unorthodox that it raises many ethical and policy questions, if not also legal ones.

It always has, since the beginning of my forays into Computer Science. I did two startups in the nineties, at the heart of which were AI-driven innovations. The world's recent embrace of AI, thus, also fascinates me. Driverless cars are all the rage these days. Uber is chomping at the bit to replace the headache of having to pay anything at all to their drivers, having driven the labor cost down already to the minimum.

Carmakers and tech companies are in a race to put autonomous vehicles on the road, and it's time for regulators to tap the brakes. This month the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration revealed that it is investigating two crashes involving Tesla vehicles allegedly operating on autopilot. Tesla's autopilot feature is a semi-autonomous system that uses cameras, radar and sensors to steer the car, change lanes, adjust speed and even find a parking space and parallel park. It's not supposed to turn a Tesla sedan into a self-driving car, but there's ample evidence on YouTube of people driving with their hands off the steering wheel, playing games and even climbing into the back seat while their car is hurtling down a freeway. You and your daughter are riding in a driverless car along Pacific Coast Highway.

Pretty much every cinematic portrayal of artificial intelligence has been less than encouraging. HAL 9000 kills the crew members on the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey, making us all a little bit afraid of handing the reins over to computers. Sonny kills his creator in I, Robot, increasing worldwide scepticism about the integration of humans and their smart robots. Even real life AI has given us pause. For example, when an IBM computer defeated Russian chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in the 1990s, it was definitely a cause for concern.

A few years ago I was backing an SUV into a parking spot in a Boston garage, listening for the telltale beeps of the ultrasonic parking sensors to tell me I was getting too close. Even though the parking-assist system was active, the chirps never came, so I got out to see what was the matter. Good thing I did, because I was about six inches from slamming the top of the rear hatch into an overhead concrete beam about five feet off the ground. The wall at bumper-height was still at least 10 feet back, hence the silence from the sensor-drive system. I was right not to trust it, because it wasn't designed to look up.

The co-founder of AI startup Vicarious predicts that the tech industry is on the cusp of a major breakthrough in AI, CIO reports. D. Scott Phoenix said the availability of huge amounts of data and cheap storage, memory and computing power will enable AI to make a major leap as soon as this summer. A Bank of America report citing IDC research recently predicted that the AI industry will grow to 70 billion by 2020 from just 8.2 billion in 2013. "We saw something similar in the early days of software -- and the early days of the Internet," Phoenix told CIO. "We're entering that era of rapid improvement." Vicarious hasn't revealed much about what it plans to unveil next, but the company has been working hard to make AI more "general-purpose."

As the country reels from the spasm of gun violence that killed two black men and five police officers this week, a prominent digital vigilante is using an online tool he hacked together to keep an eye on hot spots that seem at risk of boiling over into bloodshed. The Web app, which is powered partly by artificial intelligence, analyzes posts on social media as well as police radio chatter and feeds of the local airspace in virtually any region. To detect rumblings of unrest and alert the public. At the moment, the tool has its gaze trained on Baton Rouge, where protesters backed by the New Black Panther Party have gathered for a rally. "I'm looking for any indication they are coordinating skirmishes. Using IBM's Watson AI, the tool not only examines large collections of tweets but -- somewhat eerily -- also can go through a single user's timeline and, with Watson's machine learning technology, offer an analysis of that user's "trustworthiness, propensity toward violence [and] openness," the Jester said. That information, he said, could hold clues to a criminal's intentions. If the Jester's name sounds familiar, that's because the hacker has appeared elsewhere -- on Time's list of most influential Internet personalities, on CNN and, according to a recent blog post, on an upcoming episode of USA's "Mr.

Amid the protests against police brutality spreading across the country, Dallas is still haunted by the death of five officers at the hands of a lone gunman. However, some were concerned by the manner in which the police ended a standoff with 25-year-old Micah X Johnson, the suspect behind the shooting. The standoff ended early Friday morning when the police detonated a bomb robot, killing the suspect. The Dallas Police Department defended its action saying that the bomb was "a last resort." In a statement published Saturday, the Dallas Police Department said, "When all attempts to negotiate with the suspect, Micah Johnson, failed under the exchange of gunfire, the Department utilized the mechanical tactical robot, as a last resort, to deliver an explosion device to save the lives of officers and citizens." Police used the Remotec, Model F-5 with claw and arm extension and an explosive device of C4 with a "Det" cord.

According to TechSci Research report, "United States Artificial Intelligence Market, By Application, By Region, By End User Competition Forecast & Opportunities, 2011-2021", the artificial intelligence market in the US is projected to grow at a CAGR of 75% during 2016 - 2021 on account of growing artificial intelligence technology adoption in consumer electronic devices, research and developmental activities in healthcare industry, unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous cars, etc. Moreover, venture capital investments in this sector, are in full swing, especially in the US. The country is witnessing numerous start-ups sprouting every year, backed by various angel investors and venture capitalists. Major venture capitalist active in the United States artificial intelligence market include Accel, General Catalyst Partners, GV, Work-Bench, Promus Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, Samsung Electronics, Wipro Technologies, Samsung Global Innovation Centre, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Formation 8, among others. In 2015, western region of the United States dominated the artificial intelligence market of the country, on account of presence of major end users such as cyber security solution providers, healthcare institutes, government headquarters, etc., in the region.

As the country reels from the spasm of gun violence that killed two black men and five police officers this week, a prominent digital vigilante is using an online tool he hacked together to keep an eye on hotspots that seem at risk of boiling over into bloodshed. The Web app, which is powered partly by artificial intelligence, analyzes posts on social media as well as police radio chatter and feeds of the local airspace in virtually any region. To detect rumblings of unrest and alert the public. At the moment, the tool has its gaze trained on Baton Rouge, where protesters backed by the New Black Power Party have gathered for a rally. "I'm looking for any indication they are coordinating skirmishes … I guess I'm expecting trouble in that location, so [I] have it trained on Baton Rouge preemptively," said the creator of the site -- who goes solely by his Internet pseudonym, the Jester -- in an interview with The Washington Post.