Three years ago, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors made history by becoming the first city in the nation to ban use of facial recognition technology by local government. Last night, the board went in a different direction, giving police the right to kill a criminal suspect with a teleoperated robot if they believe there is an imminent threat of death to police or members of the public. Assistant police chief David Lazar said ahead of the vote that killer robots might be needed in scenarios involving mass shootings or suicide bombers, citing the Mandalay Bay shooting in Las Vegas in 2017 and the killing of five police officers in Dallas, Texas, in 2016. Dallas police ultimately used explosives strapped to a Remotec F5A bomb disposal robot--a model also possessed by the San Francisco Police Department--to kill that suspect. The new administrative code requires a police chief to authorize use of deadly force involving a robot and to first consider de-escalation or an alternative use of force.

On a video screen projected to a crowd attending the United Nations' summit Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, a small drone whizzes past a tech executive. It shoots a projectile into the skull of a test dummy, detonating an explosive that could kill a human. In front of an audience, the executive pitches the drones as "unstoppable" and calls them capable of "an airstrike of surgical precision" that could render nuclear weapons obsolete. The scene quickly cuts to the drones being hijacked by terrorist organizations and going on a killing spree, targeting politicians and social media activists. The film, titled Slaughterbots and produced by the Future of Life Institute, shows how easily autonomous weapons could become weapons of mass destruction.

From banks to battlefields, artificial intelligence (AI) is on the rise. But as AI influences more and more key decisions, it also raises complex questions. Will smart machines eliminate workers or help them? Should we worry about AI developing a mind of its own? "We need to look at the technology pieces that are around right now. And how they might interact in ways that we haven't anticipated," said Dr. Colin Allen, a professor of the history and philosophy of science and medicine at Indiana University Bloomington, and co-author of Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong.

A British fighter jet was returning to its base in Kuwait after a mission on the third day of the 2003 Iraq War when a U.S. anti-missile system spotted it, identified it as an enemy missile, and fired. The two men in the plane were both killed. A week and a half later, the same system--the vaunted Patriot--made the same mistake. This time, it was an American plane downed, and an American pilot killed. The missile battery that targeted the two jets was almost entirely automated.

Artificial intelligence is changing the world. At least, the White House thinks so. Last week, the Obama administration released a 60-page report titled Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence. It paints with a broad stroke the current state of A.I. in several different fields -- health, education, the environment -- and proposes ways in which industry and government can work together to advance the public good. It's a remarkable document, if only for the fact that it's being issued by an outgoing administration in its final months in office.

Time for "How Scared Should I Be?" the column that quantifies the scariness of everything under the sun and teaches you how to allocate that most precious of natural resources: your fear. The singularity is a hypothesis from computer scientist and novelist Vernor Vinge, who said in 1993 that technology is about to cause a shift as dramatic as the emergence of life on Earth, and that afterward "the human era will be ended." By this he meant that, for better or worse, computers will be running shit. Some futurists, like Ray Kurzweil, think that when the singularity hits, it's going to be fucking awesome. Ever-improving machines will start repairing our cells from the inside, thinking for us whenever we don't want to think, and generally making everything better.

Dallas Police face questions this morning over the method used to kill the sniper in last week's officer ambush. Police sent a robot armed with explosives to kill the gunman. Robots in the past have stopped a lot of dangerous situations. They can do pretty much anything a person can do: go upstairs, communicate via speakers, and use cameras to explore a scene, and at least one has been deployed to spray tear gas to subdue a suspect. But using a robot to kill?

Havoc broke out at a peaceful protest against police violence and racism in Dallas on Thursday evening when a sniper opened fire, shooting 12 officers and 2 civilians. Police cornered the suspect, now known to be Micah Johnson, in a downtown parking garage around 11 p.m. As negotiators tried to talk him out of the parking deck over a series of hours, news came out that five of the officers had died. Negotiations broke down; gunfire was exchanged between police and Mr. Johnson. Then, around 3 a.m., police reported that the sniper was dead.

Insurance lawyers have been pondering who is to blame if a self-driving car crashes, for instance. A recent report by Pro Publica also shows certain crime prediction software is racially biased when used to assessing the likelihood of criminal behavior. Asaro is also a member of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, which advocates banning weapons like drone planes that attack targets without human intervention. "There is a moral, and often a legal, requirement to judge the necessity of taking life or doing violence against a person," Asaro says. "Machines, including AI technology for as far as we can foresee their capabilities, will not be moral or legal agents such that they would be capable of making these judgements."

"The development of a special military robot is one of the priorities of military construction in Russia," the Russian daily newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported recently. The purpose of Iron Man, the newspaper continued, is to "replace the person in the battle or in emergency areas where there is a risk of explosion, fire, high background radiation, or other conditions that are harmful to humans." Experts have known that Russia has been trying in recent years to match the US and China in the development of robots, drones, and other war machines that are potentially autonomous. Today, those machines are remotely controlled. Iron Man and other recent developments illustrate how they're making progress.