The drone, loaded with explosives, crashed without exploding, crashing its nose into its stomach like a dead fish, twisting its rear propeller and crashing or firing. Initially overthrown by Ukrainian forces. The image of the plane quickly spread on social media, and armament experts have identified it as the "KUB-BLA" model produced by Russian arms manufacturer Kalashnikov's drone division "Sala Aero", colloquially known as the "Comics Drone". It can fly spontaneously to a specific area and then hover around it for up to 30 minutes before exploding itself, like a suicide bomber does. The most advanced Comicase suicide planes today belong to the category of weapons known as automatic weapons, and are considered by experts to be the third revolution in the world of war after gunpowder and nuclear weapons. The evolution from landmines to guided missiles was a precursor to true AI-powered autonomy.

All major powers are currently focusing on the development of autonomous weapon systems. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technological breakthrough that would render the world unrecognisable as we know it today. Though the idea that machines would possess human-like cognitive capabilities might have sounded like science fiction in the past century, it has now transitioned to reality. Since its inception, Artificial Intelligence has drawn attention from a diverse number of fields and the concerned "researches and developments" are moving at a staggering pace. AI-powered smart assistants to advanced training simulations and even self-driving vehicles are a reality now.

In recent years we have seen significant scientific contributions to the field of human influence, which studies how the people we know and interact with influence the decisions we make. Coupled with the data already available about retail purchases and the latest advances in artificial intelligence, these new insights on human influence can strategically impact various segments of the retail industry. For a long time, retailers have been accumulating customer transaction information through Points of Sales terminals. Usually those metrics were only able to describe how effective retailers were in their attempts to influence individual customer behaviors. Whatever happened when clients interacted afterwards with their friends, families and coworkers--the concrete acts of social influence that many times lead to purchasing decisions--remained a mystery, a black hole of information.

For every up, there is a down. For every wrong, there is a right, and for every good thing, there is a bad to go with it. There are many benefits that autonomous weapons could bring and if you were ever in a position where you needed a weapon you'd be quite grateful to have one by your side. But, what if that weapon suddenly malfunctioned and aimed at you instead? This is the main worry for a lot of people when they think about autonomous weapons, and it seems that the majority of people in 89 different nations agree too.

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Hot on the heels of confirmed reports that China is getting ready to equip cruise missiles with artificial intelligence targeting capability, a "summer study" on autonomy done by the Defense Science Board shows that the U.S. has already been thinking of weaponizing artificial intelligence. The DSB is a federal advisory committee to the U.S. Secretary of Defense, also known as SecDef, a post currently held by Ashton Carter. He is also the CEO of the United States Department of Defense. According to the publicly available DSB study, it "offers important recommendations to identify the science, engineering, and policy problems that must be solved to permit greater operational use of autonomy across all warfighting domains." The report also outlines various projects that the government can undertake that will utilize the power of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data analytics to automate several dangerous processes that are currently carried out manually, such as "offensive maritime mining" and "mine counter measure" missions.