Machine learning has had fruitful applications in finance well before the advent of mobile banking apps, proficient chat bots, or search engines. Given high volume, accurate historical records, and quantitative nature of the finance world, few industries are better suited for artificial intelligence. There are more uses cases of machine learning in finance than ever before, a trend perpetuated by more accessible computing power and more accessible machine learning tools (such as Google's Tensorflow). Today, machine learning has come to play an integral role in many phases of the financial ecosystem, from approving loans, to managing assets, to assessing risks. Yet, few technically-savvy professionals have an accurate view of just how many ways machine learning finds its way into their daily financial lives.

The Marine Corps is looking for jobs that Marines currently do which robots could do better. "Being a tiny scout and slipping through doorways" is one of them. Yesterday marked 15 years to the day since the United States formally entered into a War on Terror, and after 15 long years of war, it's not hard to imagine that there must be a better way. For the United States Marine Corps, which is focused narrowly on the work of fighting America's wars, that innovation can't come soon enough. General Robert B. Neller, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, is launching an innovation challenge today, specifically asking Marines to figure out what aspect of their jobs could be better done by robots.

ON JUNE 1st 2009, an Air France airliner travelling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris flew into a mid-Atlantic storm. Ice began forming in the sensors used by the aircraft to measure its airspeed, depriving the autopilot of that vital data. So, by design, the machine switched itself off and ceded control to the pilots. Without knowing their speed, and with no horizon visible in a storm in the dead of night, the crew struggled to cope. Against all their training, they kept the plane's nose pointed upward, forcing it to lose speed and lift.

Over the past century, we have made massive strides in the rights revolution. These include rights for women, children, the LGBT community, animals, and so much more. Exploring the future, we must ask ourselves: what next? Will we ever fight for the rights of artificial intelligence? If so, when will this AI rights revolution occur, and what will it look like? We talk about protecting ourselves from AI, but what about protecting AI from us? To create a desirable future where humans and conscious machines are at peace with one another, treating our AI with respect may be a crucial factor in preventing the apocalypse Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates fear.

Economist Milton Friedman was in favor of replacing the Federal Reserve with a computer. Maybe he was on to something. To the contrary, as a monetarist he wanted the Fed to increase the stock of money at a constant, 3%-5% rate a year, a task he thought a computer quite capable of performing. The Fed's lagged response to the 2008 financial crisis and an anemic recovery since then have given a new sense of urgency to the quest for a monetary rule or rules. For economists, the main benefit of a rule is to make monetary policy transparent and predictable. Everyone knows where the ship is headed and can plan accordingly.

The role of technology-fueled algorithms in shaping our society, and how to use them responsibly, is one of the topics I'll be exploring at the Next:Economy Summit in San Francisco, October 10-11. Some years ago, John Mattison, the chief medical information officer of Kaiser Permanente, the large integrated health provider, said to me, "The great question of the 21st century is going to be'Whose black box do you trust?'" Mattison was talking about the growing importance of algorithms in medicine, but his point, more broadly, was that we increasingly place our trust in systems whose methods for making decisions we do not understand. A lot of attention has been paid to the role of algorithms in shaping the experience of consumers. Much less attention has been paid to the role of algorithms in shaping the incentives for business decision-making. For example, there has been hand-wringing for years about how algorithms shape the news we see from Google or Facebook.

Immigration officials have deported Jose Vega-Zuniga four times, but he's always returned, and usually landed behind bars. But a recent DUI arrest culminated in a federal conviction this summer that carried up to 20 years in prison. So, prosecutors allege, he left of his own accord. Days after a federal judge issued a warrant for his arrest, Vega-Zuniga, 38, crossed the border near San Diego, sitting in the front passenger seat as his wife drove her pickup into Mexico, prosecutors said. On Wednesday, nearly a month after the brazen escape, federal authorities arrested his wife, Elba Soto, at her Moreno Valley home, according to the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles.

Tesla Motors is once again facing controversy over the safety of its Autopilot technology for assisting car drivers, this time in connection with the death of the driver in a Model S crash in China. The father of the deceased filed a lawsuit in a Beijing court in July against the car dealer who sold him the car, alleging that his son had turned on the Autopilot feature before he crashed into a vehicle in January in the northeastern province of Hebei, according to reports citing Chinese state broadcaster CCTV. Tesla has said it is unable to determine whether or not Autopilot was engaged at the time of the crash. As a result of the damage caused by the collision, the car was physically incapable of transmitting log data to Tesla servers, wrote spokeswoman Keely Sulprizio late Wednesday. "We have tried repeatedly to work with our customer to investigate the cause of the crash, but he has not provided us with any additional information that would allow us to do so," Sulprizio added in an email.

The cashiers' demands were simple: management must remove the tracking software they had installed in the checkout terminals, or the cashiers would refuse to return to work. The technology that tracked their every movement – their speed, efficiency, etc – had been installed without their knowledge, they asserted, and was an invasion of privacy. While this seems like something one might see today, this happened nearly 40 years ago at the biggest supermarket chain in Denmark. It is easy to see these cashiers as luddites, anti-progress and anti-technology, but like the original luddites they had valid concerns about the way that new technologies are used by employers. New technologies can not only lead to jobs lost through automation, but can also change the nature of work itself in detrimental ways.

The Times Bayer bets the farm in 66 billion Monsanto deal: An American pioneer of genetically modified seeds has struck a 66 billion takeover deal with Bayer, the German chemicals giant, in the latest round of megadeal consolidations in agricultural production. Lawyers set to pass M&A paperwork to machines: Luminance, a start-up backed by Mike Lynch, the British technology investor, is aiming to reduce the time taken on due diligence that accompanies multimillion-pound M&A deals from weeks to days or even hours using a new form of artificial intelligence. Public sector job numbers plunge to record low: Employment in the public sector has fallen to a record low as private sector jobs surge ahead despite Brexit, official figures have shown. Mortgage lending falls in wake of Brexit vote: The number of mortgages advanced for house purchases fell in the first month after Britain's decision to leave the European Union. Miner in'bribery scandal' intends to quit AIM: An Africa-focused mining company that has been caught up in a bribery scandal is planning to delist its shares.