But when groups are involved, with many people grabbing the wheel at once, we often find ourselves in a fruitless stalemate headed for disaster, or worse, lurching off the road and into a ditch, seemingly just to spite ourselves. It turns out that Mother Nature has been working on this problem for hundreds of millions of years, evolving countless species that make effective decisions in large groups. A human business team trying to select the ideal location for a new factory would face a similarly complex problem and find it very difficult to choose optimally, and yet simple honeybees achieve this. They do so by forming real-time systems that efficiently combine the diverse perspectives of the hundreds of scout bees that explored the available options, enabling group deliberation that considers their differing levels of conviction until they converge on a single unified decision. It enables groups of all sizes to connect over the internet and deliberate as a unified system, pushing and pulling on decisions while swarming algorithms monitor their actions and reactions.

Let's face it, we humans make a lot of bad decisions. And even when we are deeply aware that our decisions are hurting ourselves -- like destroying our environment or propagating inequality -- we seem collectively helpless to correct course. It is exasperating, like watching a car heading for a brick wall with a driver that seems unwilling or unable to turn the wheel. Ironically, as individuals, we are not nearly as dysfunctional, most of us turning the wheel as needed to navigate our daily lives. But when groups are involved, with many people grabbing the wheel at once, we often find ourselves in a fruitless stalemate headed for disaster, or worse, lurching off the road and into a ditch, seemingly just to spite ourselves.

JL Tom Siegfried reports in Science News: In real life robots have no more feelings than a rock submerged in novocaine. There might be a way, though, to give robots feelings: build the robot with the ability to sense peril to its own existence. It would then have to develop feelings to guide the behaviors needed to ensure its own survival. This calls for machines designed to observe the biological principle that life must regulate itself to remain within a narrow range of suitable conditions -- like keeping temperature and chemical balances within the limits of viability. An intelligent machine's awareness of analogous features of its state would amount to the robotic version of feelings.

After almost 10 years of working incognito, former National Aeronautics and Space Administration head Daniel Goldin is finally ready to formally present KnuEdge to the world. KnuEdge is a "neural technology innovation company," an outfit that builds hardware and software based on neural technology, with a main focus on human-machine interaction. While newly revealed publicly, it has been in stealth mode for a decade now, and has already raised 100 million in funding to build its neural chips. The company has revealed its two primary products: KnuVerse, which is a voice authentication technology, and KnuPath, its state-of-the-art neural chip. It has also unveiled Knurld.io, a software development kit with a cloud-based voice recognition and authentication service. Foremost of these offerings is KnuPath.