Loved by some philosophers, loathed by others, the so-called trolley problem is the quintessential moral puzzle. A runaway train is heading towards five people tied to a track. You can change a signal, diverting the train down a spur, so saving five lives. Unfortunately, one person is on the spur, and would die. What should you do? Most people – young and old, rich and poor – believe you should divert the train.

DeepMasterPrints created by a machine learning technique have error rate of only one in five

The persistent haze over many of our cities is a reminder of the polluted air that we breathe. Over 80% of the world’s urban population is breathing air that fails to meet World Health Organisation guidelines, and an estimated 4.5 million people died prematurely from outdoor air pollution in 2015.

As if stand-alone technologies weren’t advancing fast enough, we’re in age where we must study the intersection points of these technologies. How is what’s happening in robotics influenced by what’s happening in 3D printing? What could be made possible by applying the latest advances in quantum computing to nanotechnology?

Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra sees smart loos in our future and is anxious to sell the chips they will need.

Reality may get in the way of ambitions.

The goal of AI is not to replace doctors, it's to optimize physician performance, releasing them from menial tasks and providing alternative assessments.

With Chinese tech giants Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent focused on developing sophisticated AI-driven systems in the coming decade, the rest of the world can only watch while China builds the computer systems that will run our world in the decades to come.

The demand for living small is getting bigger. More than half of Americans would consider living in a home that's less than 600 square feet, according to a survey done by the National Association of Home Builders. And among Millennials, interest increases to 63%.

The year is 2038. After 18 months living and working on the surface of Mars, a crew of six explorers boards a deep-space transport rocket and leaves for Earth. No humans are staying behind, but work goes on without them: Autonomous robots will keep running a mining and chemical-synthesis plant they’d started years before this first crewed mission ever set foot on the planet. The plant produces water, oxygen, and rocket fuel using local resources, and it will methodically build up all the necessary supplies for the next Mars mission, set to arrive in another two years.

Batteries that use aluminum and oxygen normally live fast and die young. But a new design could help these high-energy devices endure. Aluminum-air batteries are promising candidates for a new generation of non-rechargeable batteries, because they’re super lightweight and compact. The batteries, however, aren’t widely used because their internal components quickly degrade each other.

The traditional hiring process is failing candidates, companies and recruiters. It revolves around human interpretation of complex data that is too susceptible to prejudices and mental shortcuts. A hiring process assisted by machine learning could eliminate systemic biases that put social status over skill. However, in recent news, algorithms have failed at that task. A resume screening algorithm developed at Amazon became biased against female applicants. Another such algorithm favored candidates named Jared who played lacrosse.

"A solar thermal fuel is like a rechargeable battery, but instead of electricity you put sunlight in and get heat out."

Roger Brown still remembers the shocked looks people gave him the first time he rode a Segway through the halls of the company's New Hampshire headquarters.

As if we didn’t already have enough to worry about when it comes to artificially intelligent machines being able to perform many tasks faster and better than humans can, potentially stealing our jobs in the future, and presenting what some technologists worry is an existential threat to humanity, now it appears AI will soon be able to match humans at being, well, human, too.

Opinion: We worry about glitchy driverless tech, but we should be worried about the remote human minders.

Microsoft president Brad Smith fears facial recognition. Too bad his company makes it.

Musk talks about his "excruciating" 2018, fighting with journalists on Twitter, why Tesla won’t build an electric scooter and much more.

Although the mere thought of a swarm of microrobots burrowing into an eyeball is enough to make some people squirm, scientists believe tiny, controllable delivery vehicles could be the future of eye medicine. Now, researchers have developed a tiny, rotini-shaped spiral that could one day be deployed in the thousands for targeted drug delivery.

Life may exist elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy, though try as they might, scientists have yet to detect any sign of it. Part of the problem has to do with the size of space; finding traces of organic substances or the waste signatures of alien megastructures isn’t easy at such cosmic distances. Fortunately, there’s the possibility that alien life will come to us in the form of interstellar objects.

A lump of metal in a building near Paris has long served as the global standard for the kilogram. That’s about to change…

Agriculture has a reputation of being stuck in the past. In reality, for farmers, their workplaces are a fertile testbed for innovative technology – they were among the first to embrace commercial drone use, and autonomous vehicles that could work effectively (and safely) in confined areas of farmland. Among the latest developments in agri-tech are small, farming robots that can improve crop yield and reduce farming’s impact on the environment.

Computer-generated videos are getting more realistic and even harder to detect thanks to deep learning and artificial intelligence. As WSJ’s Jason Bellini finds in this episode of Moving Upstream, these so-called deepfakes can be playful, but can also have real, damaging consequences for people’s lives.

This Halloween, the creepiest event to attend might be a mass online social experiment hosted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT is famous for churning out some of the world's top engineers, programmers, and scientists. But the university's Media Laboratory is increasingly known for launching experimental projects in October that are designed to make us squirm.

Predictive policing using data analytics is gaining acceptance among police forces, but at what cost?

A UK-based budget airline announced this week that it is “moving fast” toward developing a fleet of electric planes.

Tech CEOs and politicians alike have issued grave warnings about the capability of automation, including AI, to replace large swaths of our current workforce. But the people who actually study this for a living — economists — have very different ideas about just how large the scale of that automation will be.

The federal and local governments have long relied on private companies for defense and law enforcement technologies, from Lockheed Martin jetfighters to Booz Allen Hamilton data analysis. But increasingly, the government is expanding beyond the usual defense contractors to the company that also provides free shipping and online TV.

Sidewalk Labs promised 'privacy by design' in Quayside. Will it actually happen?

Will your job be done by a robot 10 years from now? If so, what will you end up doing? Over and over, experts have assured us that robots are not going to take over the world in the foreseeable future, but for some industries, the impact of robots will still be felt. "The angst that many people are feeling in a world where machines can do everything can only be calmed by creating new, better work for people to do," said Ben Pring, vice president director of Cognizant's Centre for the Future of Work.

Researchers say they have developed tiny readers that can detect information in light spirals

For the first time ever, scientists at the Oak Ridge Laboratory have came up with a 120-kilowatt wireless technology that charges batteries at 97 percent efficiency over a 6-inch gap. At this point, the lab claims, the new wireless charger is almost as efficient as the high speed wired chargers that Tesla uses for its cars.

Where's your Union card bub.

I, for one, welcome our AI broadcasting overlords.