When terrorists were stupid enough to come out of the shadows, they fought as a mob of individuals. One rip of a Kalashnikov or a single launch of a rocket-propelled grenade was enough. If they stood to reload, they risked annihilation at the hands of their disciplined, well-trained and heavily armed American opponents.

Today, it’s different. We see Islamist fighters becoming skilled soldiers. The thrust of the Islamic State down the Euphrates River illustrates a style of warfare that melds old and new. US soldiers fighting in Iraq used to say: “Thank God they can’t shoot.” Well, now they can. They maneuver in reasonably disciplined formations, often aboard pickup trucks and captured Iraqi Humvees. They employ mortars and rockets in deadly barrages. To be sure, parts of the old terrorist playbook remain: They butcher and execute prisoners to make unambiguously clear the terrible consequences of resistance. They continue to display an eager willingness for death and the media savvy of the “propaganda of the deed.”

We see these newly formed pseudo-armies emerging across the Levant as well. The Darwinian process of wartime immersion has forced them to either get better or die. While these new armies are becoming more professional, they retain the terrorist’s specialty of disciplined killing. Terrorist killing used to be mostly random. But now killings are often orchestrated, media-driven executions of surrendering soldiers and opposition leaders. Such strategic killing can give the armies a psychological advantage before the clash of arms begins.

Musk is talking about “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies” by Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. The book addresses the prospect of an artificial superintelligence [AI] that could feasibly be created in the next few decades. According to theorists, once the AI is able to make itself smarter, it would quickly surpass human intelligence.

What would happen next? The consequences of such a radical development are inherently difficult to predict. But that hasn’t stopped philosophers, futurists, scientists and fiction writers from thinking very hard about some of the possible outcomes. The results of their thought experiments sound like science fiction — and maybe that’s exactly what Elon Musk is afraid of. Artificial intelligences could be created with the best of intentions — to conduct scientific research aimed at curing cancer, for example. But when AIs become superhumanly intelligent, their single-minded realization of those goals could have apocalyptic consequences.

“The basic problem is that the strong realization of most motivations is incompatible with human existence,” Daniel Dewey, a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, said in an extensive interview with Aeon magazine. “An AI might want to do certain things with matter in order to achieve a goal, things like building giant computers, or other large-scale engineering projects. Those things might involve intermediary steps, like tearing apart the Earth to make huge solar panels."

"A superintelligence might not take our interests into consideration in those situations, just like we don’t take root systems or ant colonies into account when we go to construct a building.”

If your Twitter feed is anything like mine, news that Ebola might have turned up in Manhattan is freaking out a lot of Americans. “Helpful” bits of commentary include as that it’s “deadly uncurable,” has a 90% fatality rate, and causes “a hemorrhagic fever that eventually leads to a complete bleed-out.” Today’s news merely amplifies the anxiety that’s been building since word got out that two Americans infected with Ebola have been moved to US hospitals for treatment.

There are plenty of people who should be protecting themselves against Ebola’s spread — and they live in West Africa. Those of us who are in the US should feel comforted by the following: Ebola’s not airborne. It can only be spread through bodily fluids. The virus spreads when blood, semen, urine, vomit, feces, or other bodily fluids of an infected person come into contact with someone else’s mucus membranes.

And it’s not just any infected person — it’s a symptomatic infected person. People can only catch ebola from someone actually exhibiting symptoms. Those include vomiting, diarrhea, and, in some cases, hemorrhaging of mucus membranes, such as nose, nail beds and eyes — in other words, pretty hard to miss.

Nearly every hospital in the US is equipped to treat Ebola patients and keep them in isolation. And the symptoms, once they set in, are so aggressive that it’s hard to do much of anything except head to the hospital.

Another reason for all the worry is that the media (Quartz included) has tended to zero in on this outbreak’s rapid spread and its being the “deadliest in history.” While both are true, that says way more about the quality of medical care in war-torn, poverty-stricken pockets of West Africa than it does about Ebola’s virulence. Compare the Mount Sinai response with those Liberian hospitals, which are so packed that they’re having to turn away Ebola patients. The country is running out of rubber gloves, and the health ministry just dumped 37 Ebola-infected corpses in a swampy, open hole near a (so far, relatively healthy) village. Those aren’t first-world problems.

Santamarta, a consultant with cyber security firm IOActive, is scheduled to lay out the technical details of his research at this week's Black Hat hacking conference in Las Vegas, an annual convention where thousands of hackers and security experts meet to discuss emerging cyber threats and improve security measures.

His presentation on Thursday on vulnerabilities in satellite communications systems used in aerospace and other industries is expected to be one of the most widely watched at the conference. "These devices are wide open. The goal of this talk is to help change that situation," Santamarta, 32, told Reuters.

"This is historically unprecedented," former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski told Foreign Policy magazine recently. "Huge swaths of global territory are dominated by populist unrest, anger and effective loss of state control."

Brzezinski's point wasn't merely that disorder is loose in the world; that's happened in earlier periods of war and revolution (think of Europe in the aftermath of World War I, for example). His point was that chaos is breaking out simultaneously in many regions, and that governments are less capable of meeting those challenges than before.

Moreover, in an age of instant communication, conflicts can spread more readily. In the Middle East, the democratic uprisings of the Arab Spring led to anarchy in Libya, a counterrevolution in Egypt and a civil war in Syria. The war in Syria immediately became part of the larger, regionwide conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and spread across the border into Iraq.

And with that, two epic struggles were joined: the political battle over who will govern the fractious nations of the Arab world, and a religious war between two major branches of Islam. These aren't the kind of conflicts that end quickly or neatly.

Islamic State, which sees Iraq's majority Shi'ites as apostates who deserve to be killed, also seized the Ain Zalah oil field, adding to four others already under their control, and three towns. They faced strong Kurdish resistance only at the start of their latest offensive when taking the town of Zumar. The Islamists then hoisted their black flags there, a ritual that usually precedes mass executions of their captured opponents and the imposition of an ideology even al-Qaeda finds excessive.

The group, which has declared a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria, poses the biggest challenge to the stability of OPEC member Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Since thousands of Iraqi soldiers fled the Islamic State offensive, Shi'ite militias and Kurdish fighters have been seen as a critical line of defense against the militants, who have threatened to march on Baghdad.

The province's seismological bureau said that another 49 people died and 102 were injured in Qiaojia county. There are also reports saying that the death toll has reached 230 by early Monday morning local time. The US Geological Survey has estimated the quake at 6.1 on the Richter scale, while previously reporting the strikes measuring 6.3. At the same time, the China Earthquake Networks Center said the magnitude of the quake was 6.5. The quake struck at a relatively shallow depth of 10 kilometers, according to USGS.

Scientists warn communication systems will be crippled, vital services such as transport, sanitation and medicine will close, and loss of power will plunge the planet into darkness. Ashley Dale, member of international task force SolarMAX set up to identify the risks of a solar storm, said: "Without power, people would struggle to fuel their cars at petrol stations, get money from cash dispensers or pay online."

"Water and sewage systems would be affected too, meaning that health epidemics in urbanised areas would quickly take a grip, with diseases we thought we had left behind centuries ago soon returning." Mr Dale said a solar superstorm could cause around £1.5 TRILLION of damage across the globe, wiping out communication systems and transport networks.

"It is only now, when we are so dependant on technology, that we are so vulnerable, and one is overdue by about five years. We are looking at a major event, it sounds like scaremongering but we’re not, there are very serious implications. Before, its impact on civilised life was relatively small as there was less reliance on electronics, a similar event now would be nothing short of catastrophic."