When a sleepy Marc Dubois walked into the cockpit of his own aeroplane, he was confronted with a scene of confusion. The plane was shaking so violently that it was hard to read the instruments. An alarm was alternating between a chirruping trill and an automated voice: "STALL STALL STALL." His junior co-pilots were at the controls. In a calm tone, Captain Dubois asked: "What's happening?" Co-pilot David Robert's answer was less calm. "We completely lost control of the aeroplane, and we don't understand anything! The crew were, in fact, in control of the aeroplane. One simple course of action could have ended the crisis they were facing, and they had not tried it. But David Robert was right on one count: he didn't understand what was happening. As William Langewiesche, a writer and professional pilot, described in an article for Vanity Fair in October 2014, Air France Flight 447 had begun straightforwardly enough – an on-time take-off from Rio de Janeiro at 7.29pm on 31 May 2009, bound ...

The first episode of HBO's Westworld heavily implied that a terrified robot was being raped -- and not for the first time either. Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), a 30-year-old automaton that thinks it's a 30-year-old woman, cries and begs and screams. But there are people who go in for this sort of thing. Porn sharing communities often call rape-themed videos "struggle porn" or hide behind neologisms like "painal." The ones that focus on robots are more forward than that because there is no crime implied.

"As president, what would be your approach to workforce automation?" That's an important question that has yet to be raised during the 2016 presidential election race, but the answer could have a profound impact on how trends in automation impact the wider economy. Predictions may vary as to how many jobs the American economy could lose over the next one or two decades. An Oxford study predicts 47% of jobs could be automated by 2033; consulting firm Gartner predicts 33% by 2025. A recent OECD study suggests previous figures to be very much overblown, that the total jobs lost to automation in the next two decades is closer to 9% across 21 countries.

When a sleepy Marc Dubois walked into the cockpit of his own aeroplane, he was confronted with a scene of confusion. The plane was shaking so violently that it was hard to read the instruments. An alarm was alternating between a chirruping trill and an automated voice: "STALL STALL STALL." His junior co-pilots were at the controls. In a calm tone, Captain Dubois asked: "What's happening?" Co-pilot David Robert's answer was less calm. "We completely lost control of the aeroplane, and we don't understand anything! The crew were, in fact, in control of the aeroplane. One simple course of action could have ended the crisis they were facing, and they had not tried it. But David Robert was right on one count: he didn't understand what was happening. As William Langewiesche, a writer and professional pilot, described in an article for Vanity Fair in October 2014, Air France Flight 447 had begun straightforwardly enough – an on-time take-off from Rio de Janeiro at 7.29pm on 31 May 2009, bound ...

Uber's Pittsburgh Experiment, featuring semi-autonomous vehicles, is up and running. If only its fleet could distinguish the proper path down a one-way street. And Google is reporting smashing results for its autonomous vehicle program. This is a public service alert for all you Yinzers out there: Get off the road; you're in danger. While we're at it, to unemployed tech bros desperate to get a foot in the Silicon Valley door: Don't take a gig as a Google autonomous vehicle test driver.

Securing your digital assets is a clear need for any business and individual, whether you are looking to protect your personal photos, company's intellectual property, customers' sensitive data or any other aspect that can harm your reputation or business continuity. This need will continue to grow massively over the next few years as the amount of generated and aggregated data is exploding (IDC predicts that by 2020, the volume of digital data will reach 44 Zettabytes, 1,000,000,000,000 GB 1ZB). The greatest challenge, in all disciplines of Cybersecurity, is to be able to recognize new threats efficiently without relying on any signatures or easy to bypass heuristics, which rely on known, previously-seen malicious activities. Supporting this trend, although billions of dollars are spent on cybersecurity (the latest estimate by Garter, worldwide information security spending will reach 81.6 billion in 2016), we keep seeing the growing number of reported cyber-attacks and the higher magnitude of breaches every day, for example the recently published high-magnitude cyber-breaches -- Yahoo 500M accounts data breach is among the biggest in the history, Dropbox confirmed 68M accounts details leaked. There are many Cybersecurity frontiers where harnessing the predictive power of AI might bring the upper hand to security vendors and to us all, individuals and businesses.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS The British pound endured one of its biggest falls ever on Friday with some in the markets blaming trading robots or a fat-fingered typo for sending the currency down a precipitous 6 per cent in just a couple of minutes. For one of the world's major currencies, which is held as a reserve by countries around the world, that's a huge move, matched only by the pound's fall in the wake of dramatic events like Britain's June 23 vote to leave the European Union. Early Friday during Asian hours, the pound tumbled from 1.2600 to as low as 1.1789 in the space of two minutes, according to financial data provider FactSet. It recovered since that cliff-like fall to trade at 1.24 later Friday. Still, that's a level the currency hasn't seen since 1985 and way down on where it started the week, just below 1.30.

Meet Promobot IR77, an artificial intelligence (AI) designed to have face-to-face interactions with humans. It looks cute, but this Russian-made robot had recently been "arrested," after making rounds in a political rally, recording voters' opinions about a candidate's team. It sounds fairly harmless, but Promobot seemed to have made enough trouble to make the local authorities ask policemen to apprehend and detain the robot. "Police asked to remove the robot away from the crowded area, and even tried to handcuff him," the Promobot spokesperson said. This isn't the first time that Promobot got itself in a fair amount of mischief--it's run away from its home laboratory before, twice. The mad run for freedom ended with a battery-drained robot blocking thickening traffic in the street; the programmers were left scratching their heads.

JOHANNESBURG – At first, the drone took some explaining. Anxious villagers buzzed with rumors of a new blood-sucking thing that would fly above their homes. The truth was more practical: A United Nations project would explore whether a small unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, could deliver HIV test samples more efficiently than land transport in rural Malawi. Once understanding dawned and work began, young students and their teachers would spill out of the nearby school, cheering, each time they heard the drone approaching. "It was very exciting," UNICEF official Judith Sherman said. As drones quickly pick up momentum around the world in everything from military strikes to pizza delivery, Africa, the continent with some of the most entrenched humanitarian crises, hopes the technology will bring progress.

For more than a decade, engineers have been eyeing the finish line in the race to shrink the size of components in integrated circuits. They knew that the laws of physics had set a 5-nanometer threshold on the size of transistor gates among conventional semiconductors, about one-quarter the size of high-end 20-nanometer-gate transistors now on the market. A research team led by faculty scientist Ali Javey at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has done just that by creating a transistor with a working 1-nanometer gate. Boeing CEO vows to beat Musk to Mars Boeing Co. once helped the U.S. beat the Soviet Union in the race to the moon. Now the company intends to go toe-to-toe with newcomers such as billionaire Elon Musk in the next era of space exploration and commerce.