Who will deliver our packages in the future -- drones, or self-driving robots? Amazon has an entire division devoted to developing drones that can carry them over the air to our doorsteps, but it also recently filed a patent on a ground-based, driverless-delivery vehicle. In so doing it joins a handful of startups and companies who are working on similarly small, self driving robots that will carry goods via the sidewalk. They're much slower than drones and they get in the way of pedestrians, but developers at thyssenkrupp Elevator think the wheeled couriers will catch on quicker than drones. Torsten Scholl, who invented the TeleRetail robot with thyssenkrupp and displayed it at the Washington Auto Show last week, says he recently took the gadget to a small village in the Swiss mountains, hoping to film it in action with a drone. Soon after he sent the drones up in the air, passers-by in the village approached him to complain, saying they "didn't want drones around here," and that the devices weren't allowed.

The simplest way to eliminate the spread of fake news would be to limit ourselves to a small group of mainstream publishers who do all their own reporting and fact-checking. The counterargument, of course, is that an open and democratic society allows for a wide range of voices, not just the ones a small cabal of editors deem acceptable. Fake news promises to destroy this system and undermine trust and democracy, which is why addressing fake news has become one of the tech industry's most significant and important challenges. His initial focus, post-9/11, was on national security, which is how he first become intrigued by the advantages AI offers in analyzing complex data sets. As 2017's fake news scandals grew, DeAngelis was approached by leading media industry veteran Greg D'Alba, CEO of VIDL News, to apply the same type of analysis Enterra was using to control the complex value chains of Fortune 500 companies to the media industry, where D'Alba saw a growing need to verify and validate news stories.