Today marks one year since the Air Force's X-37B secret robotic space plane last launched into space, as Spaceflight Now notes. It is still there, doing the secret things a robot space plane does. Things like test a new ion engine and maybe track other space stations. It's spent 15 months and longer in orbit before, doing secret space stuff, so we can expect it to spend some more time there doing secret space things secretly. Because this is the world we live in, now.

From New York National Guard: "A bomb disposal robot, piloted from a distance, examines a downed drone with explosive material tethered to it during training." Looks like that bomb was ... frozen in its tracks. Look, I'm not going to beat the lede from the New York National Guard, so here it is in full: The remote-controlled robot bumped across the divots of the grassy field until it reached the downed toy drone. Its camera gazed up and down as it examined the explosive device nearby, in a Taylor Swift lunch box tethered to the drone. The drone, the robot, the lunch box, and the explosive device were part of an exercise called Raven's Challenge.

At the Stanford shopping center in Palo Alto, California, there is a new sheriff in town – and it's an egg-shaped robot. Outside Tiffany & Co, an unfortunate man holding a baby finds himself in the robot's path. It bears down on him, a little jerkily, like a giant Roomba. The man dodges but the robot's software is already trying to avoid him, so they end up on a collision course. "I've seen Terminator," the man says, half to himself and half to the amused crowd, "and that is some Skynet-ass shit."

The artificial intelligence revolution is clearly happening. A.I. will transform medicine, give us all super-smart virtual assistants, fight crime and a thousand things more. In order for A.I. to work its miracles, it's going to need data. And I'm predicting that we'll willingly give that data. Do you use Siri, Google Now, Cortana or Alexa?

Transition Between The Current Market And Where The Market Is Going 1.3.3

From movie shoots to search-and-rescue operations to your neighborhood park, drones are everywhere. This week, the Federal Aviation Administration released data revealing the exact whereabouts of the country's registered drones. Among the findings: Los Angeles County is the drone capital of America, with 12,250 registered drones. In second place is Arizona's Maricopa County, home to a number of Phoenix-based aerial photography companies. Looking at the data from a per capita perspective, Hinsdale County, Colorado wins out, with 5.2 drones for every 1,000 people.

The possibility that a malevolent artificial intelligence might pose a serious threat to humankind has become a hotly debated issue. Various high profile individuals from the physicist Stephen Hawking to the tech entrepreneur, Elon Musk, have warned of the danger. Which is why the field of artificial intelligence safety is emerging as an important discipline. Computer scientists have begun to analyse the unintended consequences of poorly designed AI systems, of AI systems created with faulty ethical frameworks or ones that do not share human values. But there's an important omission in this field, say independent researcher Federico Pistono and Roman Yampolskiy from the University of Louisville in Kentucky. "Nothing, to our knowledge, has been published on how to design a malevolent machine," they say.

Over the past few months Google, Microsoft and Facebook have taken major decisions to make their artificial intelligence API's 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.

The Expo Line, which opens today, will get you from downtown L.A. to Santa Monica in 50 minutes. That's the same as the old Red Car system took more than a half-century ago. Some experts say speeding up Metro's rail lines is crucial to the goal of getting more commuters out of their cars and using mass transit. San Francisco's police chief stepped down under pressure amid growing controversies over allegations of corruption and racially biased behavior on the part of the department. There was another fatal shooting that generated debate hours earlier.

Self-driving cars are pretty smart, but it's inevitable that one will eventually hit a pedestrian. To avoid any nasty injuries, Google has patented a simple but crazy solution: an adhesive coating that would stick humans to the hood like flypaper. There's no guarantee that such a system will be used -- Google stressed this to the San Jose Mercury News -- but it does hint at the company's crazier, off-the-wall thinking. The patent describes an "eggshell-like" coating that would protect the adhesive layer during normal driving conditions. Only the force dealt by a collision would be enough to break it, catching the pedestrian near-instantaneously.