Amazon delivery can be tough, unglamorous work. Workers must often reckon with complicated geography, demanding bosses, ever more biblical weather, and schedules that force time-conscious drivers to urinate in bottles. Surprising, then, that this is effectively the role in which one of the year's most anticipated video games casts the player. In Death Stranding 2, you arrange packages into swaying towers on your back, nudge the controller's left- and right-shoulder buttons to keep your weight balanced as you trip down rocky hills, and incur financial penalties for scuffing the merchandise if you take a tumble. The premise is a long trek from the super-soldier games, such as Call of Duty and Helldivers, that dominate the sales charts--even if you must occasionally battle the odd spectral marauder from a parallel dimension to clear the way to the next address on your delivery sheet.

LOS ANGELES – A few days after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, a year ago, taser-maker Axon Enterprise floated the idea of a "nonlethal" drone for schools that could be activated by AI-powered surveillance. It caused a stir -- prompting the company's own AI ethics advisory board to quit in protest and highlighting growing unease about the ethics and effectiveness of security tools being marketed aggressively by technology firms to U.S. schools. "I had to have my secretary screen out the calls from all these companies," said Rita Bishop, former superintendent of the school system in the city of Roanoke, Virginia, recalling sales pitches for everything from drones to AI-powered surveillance cameras and weapons detectors. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites.

The Home Office plans to use artificial intelligence to reduce the asylum backlog, and is launching a three-day hackathon in the search for quicker ways to process the 138,052 undecided asylum cases. The government is convening academics, tech experts, civil servants and business people to form 15 multidisciplinary teams tasked with brainstorming solutions to the backlog. Teams will be invited to compete to find the most innovative solutions, and will present their ideas to a panel of judges. The winners are expected to meet the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, in Downing Street for a prize-giving ceremony. Inspired by Silicon Valley's approach to problem-solving, the hackathon will take place in London and Peterborough in May.

Artificial Intelligence is making a great noise adding weight to the superhuman intelligent machines and long-term goal of human-level intelligence. It could be catastrophic for the human race if that happens to be true. At the current juncture, we are unable to specify the objective, nor can we anticipate or prevent the potential pitfalls that may arise if machines capacitate themselves with superhuman capabilities. Already, an alternate world of deep fakes exists which has caused a great deal of hullabaloo across the world, with disastrous consequences for well know personalities and power figures. Thus, with so much at stake, the great minds of today have already locked horns over a serious debate, seeking solutions, ferreting out loopholes, weighing up the risks and benefits, and so on.

At Google's I/O developer conference in 2018, Alphabet's Google CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated the amazing Duplex feature of the Google Assistant, still in development. It was all over the internet in short order, but in case you didn't see it: In the demo, he asks his Google Assistant to schedule a haircut for him, and "behind the scenes" (though we get to see it in action in this demo) the Assistant spins off an agent that calls the salon in a voice that is amazingly human-sounding. Give it a listen in the video below. Later in the demo he has the Assistant (with a male voice this time) contact a restaurant to make reservations. There's a lot to discuss in these scenarios, but for this pattern we're focusing on its human-sounding-ness.

Republican lawmakers and conservative media critics pressed President Trump on Thursday to explore new restrictions on the video-game industry, arguing that violent games might have contributed to mass shootings like the recent attack at a high school in Parkland, Fla. In a private meeting at the White House, also attended by several video-game executives, some participants urged Trump to consider new regulations that would make it harder for children to purchase those games. Others asked the president to expand his inquiry to focus on violent movies and TV shows too. Trump himself opened the meeting by showing "a montage of clips of various violent video games," said Rep. Vicky Hartzler, a Republican from Missouri. Then, Hartzler said the president would ask, "This is violent isn't it?"

In anticipation of Sunday's Emmy Awards, this week WIRED staffers are looking back at some of their favorite shows from the past year. One scene from Westworld replays in my head again and again, a little like (I imagine) one of the poor, doomed robots on the show who start noticing and remembering the programmatic loops in their simulated, hyper-violent Old West sandbox game. It's when the android Maeve, played by Thandie Newton, grabs a technician's tablet showing the dashboard for her personality software and, with a deft finger swipe, upgrades herself to genius. Yes, maybe taking control of your life by literally taking control of your life is a teensy bit on the nose. But for me it was the best flicker of weirdness from a show that--again, like its robots--dreamed big dreams.

Global technology leaders and senior executives from around the world spoke on a range of topics, including Digital India, Smart Cities, Make in India, Skill India and cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, 3D printing, drones, robotics, robotic surgeries and genomics, at the two-day EmTech India 2016 event, held in New Delhi on 18 and 19 March. The event was organized by Mint and MIT Technology Review, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The speakers included R.S. Sharma, chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India; John Chambers, executive chairman of Cisco Systems Inc. and chairman of the US-India Business Council; Una-May O'Reilly, principal research scientist, AnyScale Learning For All Group, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; and Harsh Mariwala, chairman of Marico Ltd. The full list can be accessed here. Here are edited excerpts from their speeches and discussions that followed. John Chambers, executive chairman of Cisco Systems Inc and Chairman of US-India Business Council (USIBC), reiterated the reason for his bullishness on India in a chat with Mint's R. Sukumar, on the first day of EmTech India 2016. When most of us here read the India narrative, it is not uniformly positive. Yet, you are amazingly bullish on the country. What do you see that others don't? Sometimes when you see what is happening in other countries and other businesses around the world from the outside, you are able to gather data very quickly, and then you can connect the dots on the market transitions. I am very bullish on the country for that very simple reason--follow and connect the dots on transitions. The transition to digitization will be the biggest technology change ever. I don't go into a country unless the leader, he or she, really understands this. Second, I don't go to a country that does not have sustainable differentiation capabilities.