It looks like 2024 will be a pivotal year for democracy. There are elections taking place all over the free world – in South Africa, Ghana, Tunisia, Mexico, India, Austria, Belgium, Lithuania, Moldova and Slovakia, to name just a few. Of these, the last may be the most pivotal because: Donald Trump is a racing certainty to be the Republican candidate; a significant segment of the voting population seems to believe that the 2020 election was "stolen"; and the Democrats are, well… underwhelming. The consequences of a Trump victory would be epochal. It would mean the end (for the time being, at least) of the US experiment with democracy, because the people behind Trump have been assiduously making what the normally sober Economist describes as "meticulous, ruthless preparations" for his second, vengeful term.

Unlike VR, when you're talking about augmented reality, describing what an experience is like can be incredibly difficult -- primarily because the experiences are even more contextual than relatively static virtual worlds that don't involve real-world settings. In AR, everything is about how "you" see things interacting with your real environment. Such is the case with what I'm calling the most important demonstration of Magic Leap technology to date in the form of an AI assistant called Mica. The experience was previewed on stage during Wednesday's keynote event at the L.E.A.P. conference in Los Angeles by Magic Leap's John Monos, vice president of human-centered AR and dDNA, and Andrew Rabinovich, the company's head of AI. Together, the team described a world in which a Magic Leap user will be able to interact with intelligent assistants in the form of fully realized augmented reality humans that can recognize your position in a room, as well as items in that room.

If you got a Google Home Mini to go with your Android phone this Christmas, one of the first things you probably asked it to do was send a text. But instead of asking what you wanted to say, your Google Home said this: Sorry, I can't send texts yet. But starting today, if you ask the same question to your Amazon Echo, it will happily oblige. Here's how to send SMS text messages with Amazon Echo. Echo devices have long been able to send messages to each other, but now Amazon has expanded that to the Android community as a whole, adding hundreds of millions of new devices to its ranks.

Alexa is making its move. While Amazon's virtual assistant has been tied to its own devices since its introduction more than two years ago, it is now beginning its an all-out assault on Siri and Google Assistant as it looks to establish a foothold on iOS and Android. But entering enemy territory isn't going to be easy. Apple and Google have both built their AI aides deeply into their mobile operating systems, so Alexa has to live inside apps for now. On the iPhone it's inside the Amazon shopping app, and on the Mate 9 (the only Android phone that supports it), it's accessible via a dedicated Huawei Alexa app. So to use it, you'll need to open the respective app before you can start asking questions.

The deontic logic DUS is a Deontic Update Semantics for prescriptive obligations based on the update semantics of Veltman. In DUS the definition of logical validity of obligations is not based on static truth values but on dynamic action transitions. In this paper prescriptive defeasible obligations are formalized in update semantics and the diagnostic problem of defeasible deontic logic is discussed. Assume a defeasible obligation `normally A ought to be (done)' together withthe fact `A is not (done).' Is this an exception of the normality claim, or is it a violation of the obligation? In this paper we formalize the heuristic principle that it is a violation, unless there is a more specific overriding obligation. The underlying motivation from legal reasoning is that criminals should have as little opportunities as possible to excuse themselves by claiming that their behavior was exceptional rather than criminal.