Experts say artificial intelligence -- which has wide applications across the military, civil and private sectors -- will be critical to furthering space technology as the cosmos becomes more contested. "The space environment continues to rapidly evolve," said Melanie Stricklan, CEO of Slingshot Aerospace, a space simulation and analytics company based in Austin, Texas, and El Segundo, California. "We continue to proliferate with new users and capabilities, new sensors both on orbit looking down, and on the Earth looking back up at space." Artificial intelligence can improve space domain awareness, accelerate command-and-control decisions as well as inject resiliency into satellites and their corresponding networks, she said during an online panel discussion hosted by Booz Allen Hamilton. "There's a lot of limitations for space today, but I think AI solutions really offer a transformative opportunity for ... the protect-and-defend mission on the defense side [and] for improving operations on the commercial side," Stricklan said.

The self-driving car has come to seem like an idea that's always a few years away from reality. According to two women leading efforts to commercialize autonomous vehicles, the technology has well and truly arrived--and while it might be limited to certain niches for now, they believe it could become a lot more common in the next few years. Jody Kelman oversees the autonomous driving division of the ride-share company Lyft, which has been testing self-driving taxis in Las Vegas since 2018. Aubrey Donnellan is a cofounder and the chief operating officer at Bear Flag Robotics, which retrofits tractors to make them autonomous. Kelman and Donnellan spoke to WIRED staff writer Aarian Marshall at WIRED HQ at CES, a virtual event exploring the standout gadgets, technologies, and ideas on show at the giant trade event.

I've received a lot of feedback regarding my last few columns about drones, simulations and new uses for artificial intelligence. My most recent column about creating an AI that could task the kind of swarm intelligence found in bee colonies to do some amazing things, like controlling weather satellites, in particular generated a lot of buzz. Much of the feedback I received was from federal agencies and IT companies working on futuristic AI programs. I'll probably be highlighting some of them in the near future. But there was also a note from a company called Hypergiant about how they were working with the Army's Robotic Combat Vehicle program not for some advanced combat project, but simply using AI to help with predictive maintenance tasks.