Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. MADRID (AP) -- Capitalizing on an impressive moment in Spanish-language music, Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler is embarking on his first tour of Europe. "Even Don Quixote didn't get as far as urban Spanish-speaking music is getting today in the world. You can go everywhere and you will find music that was written in Spanish," he told The Associated Press in an interview.

Recently, a simple but powerful language for expressing and learning general policies and problem decompositions (sketches) has been introduced in terms of rules defined over a set of Boolean and numerical features. In this work, we consider three extensions of this language aimed at making policies and sketches more flexible and reusable: internal memory states, as in finite state controllers; indexical features, whose values are a function of the state and a number of internal registers that can be loaded with objects; and modules that wrap up policies and sketches and allow them to call each other by passing parameters. In addition, unlike general policies that select state transitions rather than ground actions, the new language allows for the selection of such actions. The expressive power of the resulting language for policies and sketches is illustrated through a number of examples.

Some of the most relevant future applications of multi-agent systems like autonomous driving or factories as a service display mixed-motive scenarios, where agents might have conflicting goals. In these settings agents are likely to learn undesirable outcomes in terms of cooperation under independent learning, such as overly greedy behavior. Motivated from real world societies, in this work we propose to utilize market forces to provide incentives for agents to become cooperative. As demonstrated in an iterated version of the Prisoner's Dilemma, the proposed market formulation can change the dynamics of the game to consistently learn cooperative policies. Further we evaluate our approach in spatially and temporally extended settings for varying numbers of agents. We empirically find that the presence of markets can improve both the overall result and agent individual returns via their trading activities.

Apple knows a thing or two about cracked screens, which may explain why the computer giant has filed a patent for a car windshield that notifies the owner when it's damaged. A patent uncovered this week describes a system that would use conductive film between two layers of glass to monitor if there's been damage. While most drivers would notice if a chunk of their windshield was gouged out, the proposed system could identify fractures and nicks before they became serious. It might one day even notify your car's computer to book an appointment at the garage automatically, according to the application. A patent filed by Apple that was uncovered this week describes a system that would monitor for windshield damage.

The question of whether an artificial general intelligence will be developed in the future--and, if so, when it might arrive--is controversial. One (very uncertain) estimate suggests 2070 might be the earliest we could expect to see such technology. Some futurists point to Moore's Law and the increasing capacity of machine learning algorithms to suggest that a more general breakthrough is just around the corner. Others suggest that extrapolating exponential improvements in hardware is unwise, and that creating narrow algorithms that can beat humans at specialized tasks brings us no closer to a "general intelligence." But evolution has produced minds like the human mind at least once.

Christine Peterson is not only the co-founder and past president of the Foresight Institute for Nanotechnology but also the person credited with coining the term open source software. More recently her interests have evolved to include longevity and life extension technologies and she is currently the CEO of Health Activator. During my Singularity 1 on 1 interview with Christine Peterson we discuss a variety of topics such as: how she got interested in nanotechnology and the definition thereof; how, together with Eric Drexler, she started the Foresight Institute for Nanotechnology; her interest in life extension; Dr. Drexler's seminal book Engines of Creation; cryonics and chemical brain preservation; 23andMe and other high- and low-tech tips for improved longevity; whether we should fear nanotechnology or not; the 3 most exciting promises of nanotech; women in technology; coining the term "open source" and using Apple computers; the technological singularity and her take on it… As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full. To show your support you can write a review on iTunes, make a direct donation or become a patron on Patreon. Christine Peterson writes, lectures, and briefs the media on coming powerful technologies, especially longevity and nanotechnology.

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Amazon has been able to disrupt traditional retailers because its technology is so advanced, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Thursday. "They're going to have robots building robots. And then we're really going to have nothing. We may be naked," Cramer said on "Squawk on the Street." That kind of hyperbole may not be too far from reality as artificial intelligence continues to build on what computers can do, and Amazon continues to automate its warehouses while using big data to manage inventory.

SURFING the web and making free internet phone calls on your Wi-Fi laptop, listening to your iPod on the way home, it often seems that, technologically speaking, we are enjoying a golden age. Human inventiveness is so finely honed, and the globalised technology industries so productive, that there appears to be an invention to cater for every modern whim. But according to a new analysis, this view couldn't be more wrong: far from being in technological nirvana, we are fast approaching a new dark age. That, at least, is the conclusion of Jonathan Huebner, a physicist working at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. He says the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. And like the lookout on the Titanic who spotted the fateful iceberg, Huebner sees the end of innovation looming dead ahead.

When industry observers reference "smart manufacturing," Industry 4.0 or the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), it is often related to connecting plant floor equipment and analyzing Big Data in an effort to increase quality and efficiency on the production line or in the supply chain. But sometimes it is the most simplistic applications that make the biggest difference. Enter Otto Motors, a start-up division of Clearpath Robotics, which is focused exclusively on intelligent self-driving vehicles (SDVs) for material transport in factory and distribution facilities. The company and its products, including the Otto 100 for light-load material transport and the Otto 1500 for heavy-load transport, were unveiled this week at the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) in Chicago. The company launched in April of this year to focus on bringing modular SDVs that use onboard sensors to navigate the facility.