Autonomous AI agents have begun to take over entire tasks start to finish. And this is just the beginning. We expect to see a plethora of such agents in the next half decade, and these will take on all sorts of tasks that humans currently perform, if unhappily. In many ways the machines will be better at these tasks than we are. Self-driving cars have superhuman sensors, reaction time and true multitasking, and they will always apply their full attention to the task at hand, driving!

A country's dexterity with artificial intelligence technology might be the next strong source of national pride and international power. Knowing it would lay the foundation for the future of medicine, IBM captured the world's imagination in 2011 with Watson, a supercomputer that not only won Jeopardy!, but beat trivia superstar Ken Jennings in the process. The novel cognitive computing technology was quickly adapted to "read" the thousands of medical research papers published weekly in order to diagnose cancer patients more accurately than human doctors seemingly could. It's a banner technology for IBM, a company that remains no slouch in its 105 years of operation Now five years after Watson's debut, Japanese researchers at Kyoto University and Fujitsu are collaborating to build their own computing technology that's fairly characterized as a response to Watson. Skipping the game shows and going straight to medical applications, the Japanese system aims to close the gap in understanding how our genes determine our health by accounting for a patient's genetic code in its computer-generated diagnoses.

Bogdan Botezatu discusses how defenders are using machine learning algorithms to help beat the malware and give themselves the best possible chance of evading and protecting against APTs. While some predict that particular activities could be replaced almost entirely (78 percent) by machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms, they mostly refer to physical and predictable activities, such as operating machinery or assembly line working. When it comes to machines completely taking over our jobs and lives, rest assured, we still have a long way to go. As for cyber-security, with more than 300,000 unique malware samples emerging each month, using flesh-and-blood security researchers to manually go through that much data is unrealistic and counterproductive. To that end, modern internet security companies have started developing and training machine learning algorithms to take over a great deal of the daily automation involving malware detection and analysis, with the same accuracy as a highly skilled and experienced security researcher.

You might be impatient for a self-driving car that can roll you from the bar to your house when you're too buzzed to drive, but autonomous vehicles have bigger problems to worry about. Since 2000, the fire season has grown longer, and the damage more severe. The US spent more than $2 billion fighting the flames last year--and it lost six firefighters doing it. The solution, according to Lockheed Martin, is taking the human out of the battle. In a series of demonstration flights last week, the defense contractor showed off four unmanned aircraft that join forces to beat back the flames.

A study shows that almost 60% of people are willing to ride in a self-driving car, but that might be because we still fail to realize the real implications of putting our lives and the lives of others in the hands of an autonomous vehicle. You're in a self-driving car, cruising down the highway, when something goes wrong. Should the car save you or the people crossing the street? Should a self-driving car slam into a wall to save women, children, and the elderly? What if it's to save a couple of criminals instead?

The former F-16 and Air Force Thunderbirds pilot took over as commander of the unit in July 2015 and continues to fly drone missions himself from Creech on the MQ-9, more commonly known as the Reaper. His tenure comes at a time of unprecedented demand for the aircraft he commands – the percentage of missions in which Reapers fire their weapons has increased fivefold since 2011, he says. Now, roughly 15 percent of all the airstrikes in the war against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria are conducted by drones.

Ben Dickson is a software engineer and the founder of TechTalks. More posts by this contributor: Why it's so hard to create unbiased artificial intelligence How to facilitate the path to brownfield IoT development Why it's so hard to create unbiased artificial intelligence How to facilitate the path to brownfield IoT development Why it's so hard to create unbiased artificial intelligence 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. The related costs -- including medical expenses, wage and productivity losses and property damage -- were estimated at $152 billion.

Defined as a way to provide computers with the ability to learn without the need for programming, the term Machine Learning seems to be this year's big buzzword. In fact today you'd be hard-pressed to find a security vendor that doesn't claim to incorporate some form of machine learning or AI technology into their threat prevention solution. So how much is true and how much is smoke and mirrors? Despite being a concept first envisioned back in the 1950s by Alan Turing, the lack of computing power has held research teams from making any significant jump towards realising the technology. Nowadays we all rely on machine learning without even knowing it – Google's search engine is powered by machine learning APIs, as is Facebook's personalised news feed.

Weather conditions this week will impact the progress of the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), said Wednesday. The underwater operation to locate the missing plane had already been pushed to end in January 2017 in accordance with the weather forecast. ATSB, which is leading the search for the Boeing 777-200, said in its operational update that weather conditions are unsuitable for both Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) operations periodically during the week. This week, search vessel Fugro Equator continued underwater search operations in the north of the search area, which is in a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean, using AUV. During the past week, Fugro Equator has undertaken five missions, each one taking an average of 21 hours.

UNITED NATIONS – U.N. member states on Tuesday condemned widespread human rights violations in North Korea and expressed concerns that funds needed to ease the dire humanitarian crisis are spent on Pyongyang's missile and nuclear arms programs. A resolution drafted by Japan and the European Union was adopted by a consensus vote in the General Assembly's committee on humanitarian affairs. Following the vote, diplomats from China, Pyongyang's ally, Russia, Syria, Iran and Cuba took the floor to state they were disassociating themselves from the outcome. The full General Assembly is expected to vote on the measure next month. North Korea has conducted two nuclear tests this year and test-fired a series of missiles, even as 18 million North Koreans out of a total population of 25 million are facing food shortages, Japan's ambassador said. "The authorities of the DPRK (North Korea), without regard to the plight of their own citizens, divert their limited resources to develop weapons of mass destruction," said Ambassador Koro Bessho.