Los Angeles Times

There is one major exception. The droid L3 is consciously trying to get her fellow robots to cast off their restraining bolts and make a bid for freedom. But L3 is treated as a joke; one scene mocks her for having romantic feelings for her captain, Lando Calrissian. Similarly, her robot rebellion isn't central to the plot, but a diversion distracting the authorities from the heist -- much as a slave rebellion serves as a light-hearted diversion in last summer's "Thor: Ragnarok." L3 is eventually killed and turned into part of Han's ship, the Millenium Falcon.

"I have a fairly strong opinions about the utility of trying to divide social and ecological challenges into mutually exclusive categories," she said. "After reading the paper several times, I am still convinced that the model and results are more consistent with a'socio-ecological' brain. Their argument that they find support for an ecological and not social brain just isn't supported by their results."

Apart from the occasional tasteless Nazi costume, the current crop of royals just doesn't seem to generate much in the way of juicy headlines. The marriages of three of her four children were on the rocks. Princess Diana had published a memoir in which she revealed the long-standing infidelity of her husband, Prince Charles. A tabloid had run a photo of a man licking the toes of the queen's estranged daughter-in-law, the Duchess of York. Oh, and Windsor Palace was extensively damaged by fire.)

The overall team performance will obviously get much better as we click on at least two of those cylinders. When we get some of our guys back in the next week, we're confident our offense is going to perform better. It's incumbent upon us, with our bullpen, to get back to what we were doing last year. We're confident we have the guys down there to perform way better than we have.

Will we demand to know when we're speaking with a bot? Or will we accept that we'll wind up unwittingly conversing with algorithms? Or do we see them merely as tools, unworthy of the values that bind civil society together? These are questions ethicists, developers and designers are puzzling over. How we respond could have far reaching implications for how humans ultimately treat each other.

In recent years, AI researchers have developed and fine-tuned deep-learning networks -- layered programs that can come up with novel solutions to achieve their assigned goal. For example, a deep-learning network can be told which face to identify in a series of different photos, and through several rounds of training, can tune its algorithms until it spots the right face virtually every time.

Police in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler are investigating a collision involving a self-driving vehicle owned by Google spinoff Waymo. Authorities say the crash happened Friday afternoon when a Honda sedan swerved to avoid hitting another car. As a result, they said, the Honda went into opposing traffic lanes and hit the Waymo car. Police said the Waymo vehicle was in autonomous mode and had an occupant in the driver's seat who suffered minor injuries. Waymo is owned by Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company.

But like the original, this "Remain in Light" represents an act of outreach. To make it, Kidjo teamed with Jeff Bhasker, an A-list American pop producer known for his work with Beyoncé and Kanye West. And there are cameos by Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend and Devonté Hynes of Blood Orange -- just two of the countless young art rockers indebted to Talking Heads.

Let's be clear about this: Musk has no statistical grounds to state categorically that autonomous systems are safer than human-driven vehicles. That conclusion might stand to reason, since human error is blamed for most vehicular deaths and injuries, but autonomous systems might create dangerous situations we can't yet anticipate. His apparent assumption that the debate is over -- "Vehicles that we're producing are capable of full autonomy," he said -- is a little scary, considering how much still needs to be learned about the functioning of fully autonomous cars, and about the interaction of autonomous systems with humans in the cockpit.

Frail humans require too much "stuff" to survive in space: oxygen, food, water, heating, cooling, pressurization, medication, sanitation, suits, restraints and so much more. These items add up to weight, bulk, layers of gear, electronics, storage and living space.