Skynet drone-delivery mailbox in the running for $1m prize

Enter Skynet. Along with his tech-savvy partner on the project, the electronics engineer Grant Bajema, Burchat has designed a barcoded and GPS-tagged net that he believes could be mounted on the homes, balconies and backyards of the near future. The opulent gulf state wants to lead what it predicts will be a $10bn industry by 2025, and has offered a US$1m prize to the most promising concept.

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Imagination, reality flow in opposite directions in the brain

As real as that daydream may seem, its path through your brain runs opposite reality. Aiming to discern discrete neural circuits, researchers have tracked electrical activity in the brains of people who alternately imagined scenes or watched videos.

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Elon Musk warns technology could kill us in five years

"I am not alone in thinking we should be worried. The leading AI companies have taken great steps to ensure safety. They recognize the danger, but believe that they can shape and control the digital superintelligences and prevent bad ones from escaping into the Internet. That remains to be seen..."

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Global action against dark markets on Tor network

“Today we have demonstrated that, together, we are able to efficiently remove vital criminal infrastructures that are supporting serious organised crime. And we are not 'just' removing these services from the open Internet; this time we have also hit services on the Darknet using Tor where, for a long time, criminals have considered themselves beyond reach. We can now show that they are neither invisible nor untouchable. The criminals can run but they can’t hide. And our work continues....”, says Troels Oerting, Head of EC3.

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Are the about to rise? new director of engineering thinks

Ray Kurzweil popularised the Teminator-like moment he called the 'singularity', when artificial intelligence overtakes human thinking. But now the man who hopes to be immortal is involved in the very same quest – on behalf of the tech behemoth. Although possibly this is what Kurzweil's critics, such as the biologist PZ Myers, mean when they say that the problem with Kurzweil's theories is that "it's a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It's as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad." Or Jaron Lanier, who calls him "a genius" but "a product of a narcissistic age".

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