Deadly drone attacks on civilians continue in Sudan's Kordofan, UN says Fatal drone strikes on civilians persist in Sudan's Kordofan, as the central region has emerged as the latest front line in Sudan's nearly three-year conflict, the United Nations has said. Addressing the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk painted a grim picture of the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has plunged the country into widespread bloodshed and humanitarian catastrophe. Turk also highlighted harrowing survivor testimonies from el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, which fell to RSF forces in October following an 18-month siege. He described accounts of atrocity crimes committed by the paramilitary after it overran the city, including mass killings and other grave violations targeting civilians. "Responsibility for these atrocity crimes lies squarely with the [RSF] and their allies and supporters," he said As Sudan's devastating civil war expands beyond the western Darfur region into the central Kordofan areas, Turk cautioned that the shift in fighting is likely to bring even more severe violations against civilians, expressing deep concern over the potential for additional grave abuses, specifically highlighting the increasing use of "advanced drone weaponry systems" by both warring parties.

UN warns of potential'ethnically driven' atrocities in Sudan's el-Fasher At least 91 people have been killed in Sudan's besieged city of el-Fasher in attacks by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) over 10 days last month, the United Nations says. The attacks took place during intensified fighting between the RSF and Sudan's army around the city, the largest urban centre in the Darfur region that remains under the control of the military and its allies, known as the Joint Forces. UN rights chief Volker Turk said on Thursday that the city's Daraja Oula neighbourhood was repeatedly attacked and subjected to RSF artillery shelling, drone strikes and ground incursions from September 19 to 29. He called for urgent action to prevent "large-scale, ethnically driven attacks and atrocities in el-Fasher." He said "atrocities are not inevitable", adding that "they can be averted if all actors take concrete action to uphold international law, demand respect for civilian life and property, and prevent the continued commission of atrocity crimes".

Car companies have been experimenting with driverless cars for decades, but their presence on roads has exploded in recent years. It became increasingly common, beginning in the twenty-tens, to see robo-taxi prototypes driving around on public streets, albeit with human "safety drivers" sitting inside, ready to take over and compensate for machine error. Then the safety drivers started vanishing. Since last year, it has been possible to hail fully driverless taxis in Phoenix. Earlier this year, they hit the streets in San Francisco, and rollouts are planned in many other major American cities.

Fox News correspondent Gillian Turner has the latest on the president's focus amid calls for an impeachment inquiry on'Special Report.' Lawmakers on the Senate Energy Committee were warned on Thursday about both the threats and opportunities that come with artificial intelligence being integrated into the U.S. energy sector and everyday life as a whole. The committee held a hearing on the rapidly advancing technology, and experts present spent a significant amount of time not only discussing AI but the ever-looming threat of China and its efforts to steal and recreate emerging U.S. capabilities. "China released their new generation of AI Development Plan, which includes [research and development] and infrastructure targets. The U.S. currently does not have a strategic AI plan like this," Committee Chair Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said at the hearing's outset.

"Write a sermon in the voice of a rabbi of about 1,000 words that relates the Torah portion Vayigash to intimacy and vulnerability. That was the prompt rabbi Joshua Franklin put in ChatGPT, the results of which he used to deliver a sermon to congregants of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in December 2022. The sermon the chatbot came up with spoke of Joseph, the son of Jacob and a prophet in the Abrahamic faiths. It quoted from a book by Brown, a professor who specializes on topics of intimacy, to define vulnerability as "the willingness to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome". Being vulnerable could mean "we are able to form deeper, more meaningful bonds with those around us", the chat bot wrote. It wasn't the greatest sermon, Franklin thought, but it was passable. And that was his point. The irony of the AI-written speech about vulnerability and human connection was that it lacked exactly what it preached: human vulnerability and emotion. "It actually had a little bit of content to it," he said. "And the congregation thought it was written by some other famous rabbis.

Long before former Google engineer Blake Lemoine publicly wondered if the LaMDA AI he was supposed to test for discriminatory speech was, in fact, a sentient being, the world wondered about the sentience of a chess-playing automaton called the Mechanical Turk. In the late 18th century, Wolfgang von Kempelen was an advisor of the Austrian-Hungary court. A self-trained expert ahead of his time in physics, science and machinery, he was also a close confidant of Empress Maria Theresa and, one day, had her ear while a French magician performed for the court. Asked his opinion of the Frenchman, Wolfgang dismissed him as a hack. His tricks were too easy to explain, and Wolfgang boasted he could easily build a machine that would be much more impressive and defy any explanation.

The first question many people ask about artificial intelligence (AI) is, "Will it be good or bad?" The answer is … yes. Canadian company BlueDot used AI technology to detect the novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, just hours after the first cases were diagnosed. Compiling data from local news reports, social media accounts and government documents, the infectious disease data analytics firm warned of the emerging crisis a week before the World Health Organization made any official announcement. While predictive algorithms could help us stave off pandemics or other global threats as well as manage many of our day-to-day challenges, AI's ultimate impact is impossible to predict.

From 1960 to 2020, the field of AI has both seen tremendous sprints of progress and strenuous "AI winter" s. Headlines have always accompanied the many breakthroughs on how computers are becoming intelligent and will soon surpass humans, followed by pessimistic views on how limited the current technology is. Currently, the field is at its highest point ever, yet, no signs of a general form of intelligence have been achieved so far, neither has a conclusive definition of what intelligence is or consciousness should look like. For more than fifty years, the field has been chasing one of the most elusive target science has ever seen. For a long time, public opinion was that anything that could play chess well would be intelligent.

The history of AI is often told as the story of machines getting smarter over time. What's lost is the human element in the narrative, how intelligent machines are designed, trained, and powered by human minds and bodies. In this six-part series, we explore that human history of AI--how innovators, thinkers, workers, and sometimes hucksters have created algorithms that can replicate human thought and behavior (or at least appear to). While it can be exciting to be swept up by the idea of super-intelligent computers that have no need for human input, the true history of smart machines shows that our AI is only as good as we are. In the year 1770, at the court of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, an inventor named Wolfgang von Kempelen presented a chess-playing machine.

The robots are taking over – or so they say. Smart devices are seemingly everywhere we look, we've accepted artificially intelligent machines into our homes and workplaces and there are even self-driving cars on the roads. It's starting to seem like it won't be long until the world is entirely automated, and we humans are merely passengers going along for the ride. The benchmark is for a machine to pass the Turing test, and although it was claimed that the Eugene Goostman chatbot did so in 2014, many have refuted the claims saying that the test was weighted in the machine's favour. The challenge in beating the 68-year-old test is for someone to talk simultaneously to a robot and a human, and if they are unable to identify which is which then the test has been passed.