UCLA police, who were called on to handle some of the nation's largest campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war last spring, are asking for approval to double their stockpile of pepper balls and sponge rounds, obtain eight more projectile launchers and purchase three new drones. The University of California Board of Regents will consider the requests by UCLA, along with the other nine UC campus police departments, on Thursday. All California law enforcement agencies are required by state law to report annually on the acquisition and use of weapons characterized as "military equipment." A UC spokesman called the police requests a "routine agenda item" not tied to protests or other particular incidents. "All of the campus's requests are for non-lethal alternatives to standard-issue firearms, enabling officers to de-escalate situations and respond without the use of deadly force," UC spokesman Stett Holbrook said in a statement.

About 78 years ago, back in the year, 1942 sci-fi legend Isaac Asimov laid out the popularly known Asimov's Laws, a set of principles which the robots should follow for the future applications, these include- Unfortunately, the first rule has been broken a lot of times, causing concerns about the dangers of Automation. The gravest threat arises from the co-working Robots also called as the Cobots, who work in tandem with the human hands. This is no exaggeration, the US Department of Labor which keeps a track of robotic injuries to the workforce, lists out serious injuries in 38 pages which are caused by robotic malfunction, and that not include the manual dangers of hacking. The insecure software systems are no help, regularly attacked by a growing number of hackers who take advantage of insecure software systems to manipulate robot programming to turn on the dark side of Robotics. In his book When Robots Kill, law professor Gabriel Hallevy discusses the criminal liability that arises from the perils of AI infiltrating the commercial, industrial, military, medical, and personal spheres.

Imagine a jobsite tool that only improves with time. Imagine a tool that records each and every change order, every bit of rework and every safety incident. Not only does that tool record it, but it also files it away for future projects. Imagine a tool that learns from the past to improve your company's future. Through artificial intelligence and machine learning, several software providers in the construction industry are building technology to do all of the above.

Google's AI research division, Google Brain, says it's on a mission to find out. On Monday, the company announced a new research program called the People AI Research initiative (PAIR for short) that's all about understanding how humans interact with machine learning. As part of that effort, the company has developed a set of best practices that its teams use to design experiences that include machine learning. It's part of a philosophy the Google UX community is calling "human-centered machine learning," where machine learning algorithms solve problems while keeping human needs and behaviors in mind. Detailed on Medium by Josh Lovejoy and Jess Holbrook, two designers in the Research and Machine Intelligence group at Google, these are Google's rules for designing with machine learning while still keeping the user–and their humanity–at the center.

Usually when people worry about machines and work, they are concerned that automation will take away their livelihoods, not their lives. But a new lawsuit claiming a rogue robot is responsible for killing a human colleague reveals additional nightmarish possibilities. In July 2015, Wanda Holbrook, a maintenance technician performing routine duties on an assembly line at Ventra Ionia Main, an auto-parts maker in Ionia, Michigan, was "trapped by robotic machinery" and crushed to death. On March 7, her husband, William Holbrook, filed a wrongful death complaint (pdf) in Michigan federal court, naming five North American robotics companies involved in engineering and integrating the machines and parts used at the plant: Prodomax, Flex-N-Gate, FANUC, Nachi, and Lincoln Electric. Holbrook's job involved keeping robots in working order.

Technology is a wonderful thing. From modern medicine to the Internet to virtual reality, technological advancements during the past century have truly been a wonder to behold. After all, without a computer, smartphone or tablet and the Internet, you wouldn't be reading wonderful and insightful investing advice from Banyan Hill online right now. And my colleague Paul Mampilly has made new developments in the Internet of Things mega trend a strong focus of his service, Profits Unlimited, which is one of the fastest-growing newsletters in the financial industry. Given the pace of advancement in recent years with robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), we are left with the question: Can too much technology be a bad thing?

On January 25, 1979, 25-year-old Robert Williams climbed into a storage rack to retrieve parts from a malfunctioning robot at Ford's Flat Rock plant in Michigan. The robot, not able to sense Williams' presence, swung round and struck him on the head, killing him instantly. The robot kept working for 30 minutes as Williams lay dead on the floor. His death, nearly forty years ago, makes Williams the first person to be killed as a result of actions by a robot. In August 1983, his family was awarded $10 million after a jury ruled against Unit Handling, the company that designed the one-ton machine.

A malfunctioning robot fatally crushed a woman's head as she adjusted machinery at her job, according to a wrongful death lawsuit filed in federal court by her husband. Wanda Holbrook, a maintenance technician for Michigan's Ventra Ionia, which does work related to trailer hitches, was inspecting machinery on July 7, 2015, when a robot from another section "took Wanda by surprise," per William Holbrook's suit. It entered Wanda's section, where hitch components were assembled, then "hit and crushed Wanda's head between a hitch assembly it was attempting to place in the fixture of section 140, and a hitch assembly that was already in the fixture." Holbrook's co-workers found her, and she died of severe head trauma at the scene, Courthouse News reports. The robot shouldn't have gone into that section in the first place, and, furthermore, shouldn't have tried to place a hitch assembly in a fixture that already had one loaded, per the lawsuit, which was filed against various companies involved in the production, installation, and servicing of the robot.

A rogue robot has been blamed for the death of a woman killed in an accident at an auto-parts factory in Michigan. Wanda Holbrook, who worked as a maintenance technician at the Ventra Ionia Mains plant for 12 years, was "trapped by robotic machinery and pronounced dead at the scene" in July 2015. The 57-year-old's widower, William Holbrook, has filed a wrongful death complaint seeking damages from five robotics companies responsible for manufacturing, installing and testing the robotics: Lincoln Electric, Flex-N-Gate, Prodomax, FANUC and Nachi. "Wanda was working in either section 140 or 150 within the '100' cell, when a robot from section 130 took Wanda by surprise, entering the section she was working," the lawsuit alleges. She "suffered tremendous fright, shock and conscious pain and suffering" when she was crushed to death, the suit claims.