"CHiPs" star Erik Estrada shared a warning about how artificial intelligence can "destroy lives." During an interview with Fox News Digital, the 75-year-old actor and "Divine Renovation" host acknowledged the benefits of AI but cautioned that the new technology is also frequently being used for nefarious purposes. "I think just like the Internet, just like the cell phones, just like everything -- they need to just use the positive side of it," Estrada said. "The side which can help or employ and create goodwill, good things, good jobs, good fortune for people that want to go in that direction and not, of course, use the negative stuff." "CHiPs" star Erik Estrada warned about the dangers posed by AI. (Brian To/FilmMagic) Estrada pointed to how AI can be used to create deepfakes -- deceptive pictures, videos and audio that misrepresent people or events.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Gabriel Zendejas Chavez leaves the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. Indicted in 2018 in an investigation of the Mexican Mafia's rackets in L.A. County jails, Chavez pleaded guilty in federal court to a rarely filed charge called "misprision of a felony." A lawyer accused of helping members of the Mexican Mafia traffic drugs, collect extortion money and expose government informants pleaded guilty Thursday in a deal with prosecutors that may spare him prison time. Gabriel Zendejas Chavez, who was indicted in 2018 in an investigation of the Mexican Mafia's rackets in L.A. County jails, told U.S. District Judge George Wu he was guilty of a rarely filed charge of "misprision of a felony."

Alberto Carvalho said he is moving foward with his venture into artificial intelligence -- a platform designed to help students and families navigate the complexities of the district -- despite the collapse of the company that designed an AI chatbot. In his first extended interview about what happened, the L.A. schools chief described a fully functional AI-driven platform that is in place and owned by the district -- with everything but a chatbot for now. But parents and teachers are questioning this characterization, because the platform is not available across the school system and its signature feature is sidelined. They said they have no idea how or how well it works, how to access it or what it is supposed to do. Their only information, they said, came from splashy media events.

Nuro Inc., a company that makes autonomous delivery vehicles for goods such as pizza, relies on AI and specialized technical skills to build and maintain its fleet. How it fills its labor requirements illustrates one of the primary ways that AI is affecting the workforce and upskilling. Nuro's self-driving delivery vehicles ostensibly reduce the need for delivery workers. At the same time, the company, headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with a manufacturing plant in Las Vegas, is creating new jobs that require a higher level of skills. Even though AI technologies can potentially eliminate jobs, that's not been the case.

During the depths of winter, temperatures in Burlington, Vermont, a state in the US Northeast, can drop far below freezing. Robert, who asked CNN to use his first name only, lives by himself and avoids leaving the house during those times. He sits at the window of his waterfront apartment overlooking the icy expanse of Lake Champlain. He feels isolated and alone. The bot is available to talk online for free, via its webpage or in messenger apps such as Facebook or Skype. Marketed as a "virtual friend," she can converse or play games with the user.

Nuro, one of the nation's best-funded self-driving vehicle startups, has begun using its robots to ferry food and medical supplies around a California stadium that has been converted into a coronavirus treatment facility, CEO Dave Ferguson announced on Wednesday. "We realized that we could potentially use our R2 unmanned vehicles to provide truly contactless delivery of goods, where we remove any possible interaction between a driver dropping off goods and a person picking them up," Ferguson wrote. Contactless delivery could reduce the spread of COVID-19. In a Tuesday phone interview, Nuro policy chief David Estrada told Ars that the robots are ferrying food, supplies, and medical equipment from the parking lot of Sleep Train Arena, home of the Sacramento Kings, into the stadium itself. Human workers at designated locations load the vehicles at one end of a trip and unload them at the other.

But can some of the same tools--specifically those that power computer vision--be used to remove the drudgery and long hours VFX artists face when it comes to rotoscoping? Oscar Estrada, a recent graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology's Motion Picture Science program, was determined to find out. Estrada presented his research Oct. 21, the opening day of the SMPTE 2019 Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. In his presentation, "Rotoscope Automation with Deep Learning," Estrada laid out his thesis research looking at whether the use of a convolutional neural network could be used to extract a person or persons from a video clip without human intervention. Convolutional neural networks are particularly well-suited to the task of rotoscoping as opposed to other neural network techniques, especially when large images like 4K are at play, he said.

In the U.S., according to industry officials, the Federal Communications Commission's reluctance to authorize sales of hardware able to disrupt radio links has hobbled growth of the nascent counterdrone industry. Only a handful of U.S. airports have advanced drone-detection programs under way, according to industry officials, and nearly all are in the testing phase. Congress, however, has instructed the Federal Aviation Administration to develop a strategy to permit wide use of counterdrone technologies across airports. Sponsors of major sports events, some concerts and large open-air gatherings, including the New Year's Eve celebration in New York's Times Square, have called on counterdrone techniques to ensure safety. But like most airports, such entities generally refrain from publicly spelling out their plans.

In a move inspired by natural engineering, robotics researchers have demonstrated how tiny palm-size drones can forcefully tug objects 40 times their own mass by anchoring themselves to the ground or to walls. It's a glimpse into how small drones could more actively manipulate their environment in a way similar to humans or larger robots. "Teams of these drones could work cooperatively to perform more complex manipulation tasks," says Matt Estrada, a PhD student in mechanical engineering at Stanford University. "We demonstrated opening a door, but this approach could be extended to turning a ball valve, moving a piece of debris, or retrieving an object of interest from a disaster zone." Winged creatures such as birds, bats, and insects can only lift objects that are about five times their own weight when flying. But Estrada and his colleagues from Stanford University and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland looked instead to the practical approach taken by predatory wasps, which land on the ground to drag larger prey back to their nests.

You might know wasps for their ability to brainwash cockroaches or inflict one of the most painful stings on Earth--one so powerful that the actual scientific advice to victims is to just lie down and scream until it passes. Lesser-known is the wasp's superlative ability to carry loads that are unexpectedly heavy given the creature's size. Small drones, or "micro air vehicles," are only able to lift the equivalent of their own weight. If we want flying robots that can move massive objects without requiring them to be the size of pterodactyls, engineers will need to come up with new ways of lifting stuff. So drone designers are looking to wasps for help, and developing creative ways to use the environment itself as a secret weapon in robotics.