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.

In much the same way children have to be told not only what they are saying is wrong, but why it is wrong, artificial intelligence (AI) systems need to be able to receive and act on similar feedback, according to Monash University Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering Head Professor Tom Drummond. "I think fundamentally we need ways of giving machine learning systems more feedback than'yes' or'no'," Drummond told journalists at the GTCx Australia conference on Tuesday. "Rich feedback is important in human education, I think probably we're going to see the rise of machine teaching as an important field -- how do we design systems so that they can take rich feedback and we can have a dialogue about what the system has learnt?" To illustrate his point, Drummond used the example of a system that was able recognise and caption images of fire hydrants, and appeared to be working well until one of the images was modified. "You take Photoshop, and you colour it green, and it says: 'A red fire hydrant'."

Following a AU 1.2 million investment, the Victorian government, in conjunction with the Transport Accident Commission and VicRoads, has partnered with automotive parts giant Bosch for the development of the first self-driving vehicle in Australia. According to Victorian Minister for Roads and Road Safety Luke Donnellan, the vehicle under construction in Clayton, Victoria, has been designed to navigate roads with or without driver input and includes the ability to detect and avoid hazards such as pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles. "By removing human error from the equation, self-driving vehicles will play a critical role in reducing deaths and serious injuries on Victorian roads," Donnellan said. "This self-driving car is at the forefront of automated vehicle technology and it's been developed right here in Melbourne by local engineers." The minister said trials of the self-driving vehicle will be used to inform the development of regulations and infrastructure to enable similar cars to operate on the state's roads in the future.