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.

Three early transportation trends could soon transform the way global city dwellers get around, analysts say. The switch to electric cars, use of car sharing services and the arrival of driverless vehicles are all expected to grow substantially by 2030 -- potentially making it cleaner and easier to navigate cities around the world, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) said Tuesday in a new report. "Vehicles and the way they are used will change more in the next two decades than they have in the last 100 years," said Colin McKerracher, BNEF's head of advanced transport in London. He said the declining costs of electric-car batteries and the rapid advance of connected technologies are key reasons for the transit transformation. BNEF and consulting firm McKinsey & Company looked at how these three developments could play out in 50 cities around the world. What they found is that the projections vary based on each city's demographics and existing transportation policies.

"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 ...

Seven in 10 Australians trust autonomous vehicles to take over when they feel tired, bored, or physically and mentally incapable of driving manually, according to a study by the Australian Driverless Vehicle Initiative (ADVI). More than 5,000 Australians aged 18 and over were surveyed by ADVI and its academic partners, including the University of New South Wales, through an 80-question survey designed to help guide research, marketing, and vehicle design efforts. According to ADVI's preliminary findings, 69 percent of survey respondents said they would rather a driverless car take the lead when driving was "boring or monotonous", and 60 percent said they would prefer an autonomous vehicle during traffic congestion. Participants said the most likely activity they would spend their time doing in driverless cars was observing scenery at 78 percent, followed by interacting with passengers on 76 percent, resting came in at 52 percent, and doing work-related activities polled at 36 percent. Almost half, 47 percent, of Australians surveyed felt self-driving vehicles would be safer than human drivers.

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.