It is the year 2050. The world population is roughly two billion people, just 25% of what it was thirty years ago. Back in 2018, the United Nations had predicted that we were approaching the point of no return on climate change. Unfortunately, by the time humanity took serious, meaningful action to the threat, it was too late. The Earth's temperature spiked destroying agriculture, triggering massive worldwide flooding, creating incredible natural disasters, and forcing people to migrate north… or underground.

Experiencing fear and anxiety may not be pleasant, but both are important emotions that drive human evolution. Our brains react to threats, preparing our bodies for what might lay ahead, in a way we learned how to thousands of years ago. But what's the science behind this inherent reaction and are there consequences? Deep breaths are hard to find. Blood rushes through the body.

WASHINGTON: The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) will announce plans in May to contract with commercial companies to for analyze satellite and other imagery data of military targets, says David Gauthier, head of NGA's new(ish) Commercial and Business Operations Group. While the first contracts will be small, the move is a big step toward the spy agency's goal of creating a "hybrid" pool of data that combines commercial imagery with low-resolution but high re-revisit rates with traditional high-resolution that is less timely Intelligence Community imagery provided by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and others. "We do foresee in the future a hybrid architecture, where we definitely require both national systems for their capabilities, and commercial systems for their capabilities," he said. While Gauthier wouldn't provide a budget for the new effort, he told me earlier this week that the plan is to evaluate the capabilities of a number of commercial companies to meet NGA's needs. "I don't want to discuss numbers at this time, but we are still operating at small scale and plan on contracting with multiple vendors to compare and contrast their capabilities," he said.

Artificial intelligence, AI, has grabbed headlines, hype, and even consternation at the beast we are unleashing. Every powerful technology can be used for good and bad, be it nuclear or biotechnology, and the same is true for AI. While much of the public discourse from the likes of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking reflects on sci-fi like dystopian visions of overlord AI's gone wrong (a scenario certainly worth discussing), there is a much more immediate threat when it comes to AI. Long before AI goes uncontrollable or takes over jobs, there lurks a much larger danger: AI in the hands of governments and/or bad actors used to push self-interested agendas against the greater good. For background, as a technology optimist and unapologetic supporter of further development, in 2014 I wrote about the massive dislocation in society AI may cause, and while our economic metrics like GDP, growth, and productivity may look awesome as a result, it may worsen the less visible, but in my opinion, far more critical metrics around income disparity and social mobility.

Artificial Intelligence is a curse and a blessing, depending on what angle you look at it from. On the one hand, the technology firepower AI brings to the table can be extremely useful, like powering our virtual assistants, smart cars, smart homes and so on; but on the other hand, the evolving nature of AI could keep eating into our jobs in a big way. According to Kai-Fu Lee, a venture capitalist, and one of the very few tech minds who has the distinction of working at all three major tech companies – Apple, Microsoft and Google – robots are likely to replace 50% of all jobs in the next decade. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the wave of the future, the influential technologist told CNBC, calling it the "singular thing that will be larger than all of human tech revolutions added together, including electricity, [the] industrial revolution, internet, mobile internet -- because AI is pervasive." He also added that AI will create a huge amount of wealth for mankind, and wipe out poverty in the process. AI will, of course, improve a lot of things that we do.

Technology-savvy criminals could be listening in to the conversations of people visiting voice-controlled websites using Google's Chrome browser, one computer expert claims. Computer security expert Tal Ater discovered that criminals could potentially use the web browser's voice recognition abilities to invade users' privacy. While the Israeli programmer reported the problem to Google last September, he says the search giant has not yet fixed the issue. Technology-savvy criminals could be listening in to the conversations of people visiting voice-controlled websites using Google's Chrome browser, one computer expert claims After reporting the problem to Google last year, he immediately received a response from the company saying that their engineers were busy fixing it. Mr Ater said that within two weeks of reporting the problem, a patch for the fix was ready.

A general game-playing program must know the rules of the particular playing game. These rules are:(1) an algorithm indicating the winning state;(2) an algorithm enumerating legal moves. A move gives a set of changes from the present situation.There are two means of giving these rules:(1) We can write a subroutine which recognizes if we have won and another which enumerates legal moves. Such a subroutine is a black box giving to the calling program the answer: 'you win' or 'you do not win', or the list of legal moves. But it cannot know what is in that subroutine.(2) We can also define a language in which we describe the rules of a game. The program investigates the rules written with this language and finds some indications to improve its play. Artificial Intelligence and Heuristic Programming Edinburgh University Press