Tesla is making several big announcements this month, and Elon Musk just delivered the first: From now on, all new Tesla cars will be self-driving. The electric automaker also teamed up with Panasonic to build solar panels for its Powerwall home battery, which it's set to update next week. Hyperloop One is forging ahead on its futuristic transportation system by raising 50 million and hiring Uber's former CFO as an advisor. It looks like Apple has scrapped plans to build a self-driving car, and BMW showcased plans for a next-gen smart motorcycle that will never crash or tip over. In energy news, scientists accidentally discovered a cheap, simple way to transform CO2 into ethanol fuel.

The Afghan Taliban has uploaded a drone footage showing a suicide bomber driving into a police base and blowing it up in the southern Helmand province. The fighters say the footage proves that they can now deploy drones as an "addition to their sophisticated possessions of advanced technologies". The 23-minute-long video, which begins with a self-proclaimed suicide bomber speaking in front of an explosives-rigged Humvee, was released on Saturday appears to be authentic, according to the Afghan defence ministry. "The remote-controlled drones to capture footage of their [Taliban] fighters conducting attacks is nothing but to instill fear among people and to indicate how far they can get in defeating us, but in fact, using a drone is not something they can call an achievement," Dawlat Waziri, spokesman for the defence ministry, told Al Jazeera by telephone. "You can get a drone anywhere, in any shop. They found or bought one, and used it."

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming very real--and at an exponentially faster rate. Moreover, those organizations that leverage AI in sync with those Hard Trends and Soft Trends that are shaping the future stand to make the most of its extraordinary potential. On one level, artificial intelligence is poised to help anticipate and address such critical issues as cybersecurity, civil unrest and even outright acts of terrorism. For example, using technology such as automated smart detection, officials at the recent Olympics in Rio were successful in maintaining security in a wide array of venues and locations. Closer to home, the Central Intelligence Agency's deputy director for digital innovation Andrew Hallman recently addressed the issue of anticipatory intelligence at an event hosted by the government and technology website NextGov.

This is my first discussion on the forum so please forgive me any faux pas but I have something really exciting to share! At work I had some free time and Azure credits so I decided to give their ML lab a whirl. I took a very broad and difficult question, although one that should have had a finite answer, and used some SCADA data to train a model that would be able to predict unplanned downtime in a well far enough ahead as to be able to send out an engineer to apply preventative maintenance. Common idea, I felt, and enough data to work something out. I won't bore you with the details (unless you ask, of course!) but something astonishing and totally unexpected came out of the analysis.

Natural disasters are out of the reach and influence of human beings. However, a lot can be done to minimize loss of lives. Artificial intelligence is one viable option that can potentially prevent massive loss of lives while at the same time make rescue efforts easy and efficient. To learn more, checkout the infographic below created by Eastern Kentucky University's Online Masters in Safety degree program. In the period between 2005 and 2015, a total of 242 natural disasters occurred in the United States of America.

We may have just seen a major player in the drive towards autonomous cars apply screeching brakes. Apple has reportedly abandoned its plans to build its own self-driving electric vehicle and is instead going to focus on the underlying autonomous software. A similar initiative to produce a fully autonomous car by Google also appeared to run out of steam. Building self-driving cars clearly poses a challenge that even the world's top technology giants can't yet meet. So what is it about building autonomous cars that is proving to be such a challenge? The high-value consumer electronics and software industry is used to very different margins than the cut-throat automotive sector, which has tough market entry conditions and tribal supply-chain relationships.

One of the major trends I have been researching recently, has been the shift in interest towards Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its multiple forms and guises, and the potential it has to analyse vast quantities of data and quickly derive actionable insights. As we all know, AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning are not new. However, there has been huge investment in the space in recent years and the ability to automatically apply complex mathematical calculations to Big Data – over and over, faster and faster – is a recent development. With steady advances in digitisation and cheap computing power, no wonder people are excited about the possibilities. One of the areas of AI that gets the most attention is Deep Learning.

On this week's Tech Tent - your weekly status update on the technology business - we have three stories reflecting our current anxieties about the nature of our digital world. We'll discuss the biggest cybersecurity threat of the moment, the use of bots in the fight to get the upper hand on social media during the US elections and the ongoing debate about the risks of artificial intelligence. This week, producer Jat Gill and I attended a demo by security firm Sophos which left us both rather scared. James Lyne from the firm played a bad guy launching an attack on a company, while two colleagues played the increasingly confused system administrators trying to work out what was going on as chaos engulfed the network. We then heard that the principle weapon in the attackers' armoury was now ransomware.

Videogame acting sounds like the cushiest gig ever. Go into the studio for a few hours, recite a few lines of dialog, and cash the checks handed out by an industry that makes billions each year. But according to the union that represents them, the actors who bring you blockbuster games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto V are underpaid and work in risky conditions. And so the 160,000 or members of the Screen Actor's Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists went out on strike on Friday. The Guild has spent months negotiating a contract with 11 major publishers, and will not do any voice acting, motion-capture work, or anything else until their contract demands are met.

The best part of "Radio Imagination: Artists in the Archive of Octavia E. Butler" is the view it provides into Butler's archive itself. Butler, who died in 2006, was a bestselling Pasadena novelist and the only science fiction writer to win a MacArthur fellowship. She was also African American, and her novels reworked the sci-fi genre with far-reaching insights on race, sex and gender. The exhibition at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena features works by eight artists who were granted access to Butler's archives at the Huntington Library in San Marino. Their responses take a variety of forms, including sound and video as well as photography, drawing and installation.