'Gutfeld!' guest host Kat Timpf and the panel discuss the ongoing'drone drama.' New York and New Jersey residents are far from the only people having issues with drones. The NFL is in the midst of its own fight against the devices and has called on congressional lawmakers to act. The leagues hope lawmakers will pass a bill to help curb the number of devices that violate airspace on gamedays. A drone flies in the air as it holds an NFL football between the NFC and AFC during the Pro Bowl Skills Showdown at Wide World of Sports on Jan. 25, 2017 in Orlando, Florida.

In the fall of 2016--the year in which the proportion of online adults using social media reached eighty per cent--I published an Op-Ed in the Times that questioned the popular conception that you need to cultivate a strong social-media brand to succeed in the job market. "I think this behavior is misguided," I wrote. "In a capitalist economy, the market rewards things that are rare and valuable. Social media use is decidedly not rare or valuable." I suggested that knowledge workers instead spend time developing useful skills, with the goal of distinguishing themselves in their chosen fields.

Stories about artificial intelligence have been with us for decades, even centuries. In some, the robots serve humanity as cheerful helpers or soulful lovers. In others, the machines eclipse their human makers and try to wipe us out. "The Creator," a sci-fi film that hits theaters Friday, turns that narrative around: The United States is intent on wiping out a society of androids in Asia, afraid the artificially intelligent beings threaten human survival. Do any of these stories reflect our real-life future?

Jaron Lanier, the godfather of virtual reality and the sage of all things web, is nicknamed the Dismal Optimist. And there has never been a time we've needed his dismal optimism more. It's hard to read an article or listen to a podcast these days without doomsayers telling us we've pushed our luck with artificial intelligence, our hubris is coming back to haunt us and robots are taking over the world. There are stories of chatbots becoming best friends, declaring their love, trying to disrupt stable marriages, and threatening chaos on a global scale. Is AI really capable of outsmarting us and taking over the world? Well, your question makes no sense," Lanier says in his gentle sing-song voice. "You've just used the set of terms that to me are fictions.

Jaron Lanier, the eminent American computer scientist, composer and artist, is no stranger to skepticism around social media, but his current interpretations of its effects are becoming darker and his warnings more trenchant. Lanier, a dreadlocked free-thinker credited with coining the term "virtual reality", has long sounded dire sirens about the dangers of a world over-reliant on the internet and at the increasing mercy of tech lords, their social media platforms and those who work for them. Nothing about the last few weeks – of chaos on Twitter and the ever-increasing spread of conspiracy theory and disinformation – has changed that. The current state of the tech industry is ripe with danger and poses an existential threat, he believes. "People survive by passing information between themselves," Lanier, 61, told the Guardian in an interview.

Is social media ruining the world? The common denominator of all these phenomena is that they're fueled in part by our seemingly innocuous participation in digital social networking. But how can simple acts like sharing photos and articles, reading the news, and connecting with friends have such destructive consequences? These are the questions explored in the new Netflix docu-drama The Social Dilemma. Directed by Jeff Orlowski, it features several former Big Tech employees speaking out against the products they once upon a time helped build.

Computers are slowly but surely learning to read our emotions. Will this mean a future without privacy, or perhaps a golden age of more compassionate and helpful machines? This edition of the Sleepwalkers podcast looks at AI's growing power to "read" us--and investigates the sinister and the positive uses of the technology. Poppy Crum, chief scientist at Dolby Labs and a professor at Stanford University, is using advanced sensors and AI to capture emotional signals. From thermal sensors that track blood flow to CO2 monitors that detect our breathing rates and cameras that track microscopic facial recognition, it's getting harder to maintain a poker face in front of machines.

A Behavior Modification Empire is an organization that establishes the means of human interaction via highly addictive technologies that elicit Pavlovian reactions to social rewards and punishments and then sells the right to manipulate participants to third-parties. Jaron Lanier, a Virtual Reality pioneer and important Internet luminary, begins a 2018 TED talk by referring to an early computer scientist named Norbert Wiener. Weiner wrote a book called "The Human Use of Human Beings," in which he envisioned a dystopian future governed by a computer system that would gather "data from people and [provide] feedback to those people in real time in order to put them . . . in a Skinner box, in a behaviorist system." One could imagine a global computer system where everybody has devices on them all the time, and the devices are giving them feedback based on what they did, and the whole population is subject to a degree of behavior modification. And such a society would be insane, could not survive, could not face its problems. Of course, Weiner's notion proved to be eerily prophetic, and now that it's happened, Lanier believes we have to figure out how to survive it.

What do a Yemeni refugee in the queue for food aid, a checkout worker in a British supermarket and a depressed university student have in common? They're all being sifted by some form of artificial intelligence. Advanced nations and the world's biggest companies have thrown billions of dollars behind AI - a set of computing practices, including machine learning that collate masses of our data, analyse it, and use it to predict what we would do. Yet cycles of hype and despair are inseparable from the history of AI. Is that clunky robot really about to take my job?

CARLO ROVELLI is the man who can spin hard physics into pure gold. The Order of Time is his third book. Like the first (Seven Brief Lessons on Physics), it has been an instant bestseller. In this state-of-the-art survey of what physicists thought and now think about the nature of time, Rovelli is both unsettling (time does not exist) and philosophical (the study of time "does nothing but return us to ourselves"). IT MAY not be a classic Christmas whodunnit, but The Beautiful Cure is a page-turner.