See radar with superhuman vision. Those are just a few of the applications that Elon Musk and employees at his four-year-old neuroscience company Neuralink believe electronic brain-computer interfaces will one day bring about. None of these advances are close at hand, and some are unlikely to ever come about. But in a "product update" streamed over YouTube on Friday, Musk, also the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, joined staffers wearing black masks to discuss the company's work toward an affordable, reliable brain implant that Musk believes billions of consumers will clamor for in the future. "In a lot of ways," Musk said, "It's kind of like a Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires."

Companies pay cloud-computing providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google big money to avoid operating their own digital infrastructure. Google's cloud division will soon invite customers to outsource something less tangible than CPUs and disk drives--the rights and wrongs of using artificial intelligence. The company plans to launch new AI ethics services before the end of the year. Initially, Google will offer others advice on tasks such as spotting racial bias in computer vision systems or developing ethical guidelines that govern AI projects. Longer term, the company may offer to audit customers' AI systems for ethical integrity and charge for ethics advice.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed a contract with facial recognition company Clearview AI this week for "mission support," government contracting records show (as first spotted by the tech accountability nonprofit Tech Inquiry). The purchase order for $224,000 describes "clearview licenses" and lists "ICE mission support dallas" as the contracting office. ICE is known to use facial recognition technology; last month, The Washington Post reported the agency, along with the FBI, had accessed state drivers' license databases -- a veritable facial recognition gold mine, as the Post termed it -- but without the knowledge or consent of drivers. The agency has been criticized for its practices at the US southern border, which has included separating immigrant children from their families and detaining refugees indefinitely. "Clearview AI's agreement is with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which uses our technology for their Child Exploitation Unit and ongoing criminal investigations," Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That said in an emailed statement to The Verge.

The news: IBM has built a new chemistry lab called RoboRXN in the cloud. It combines AI models, a cloud computing platform, and robots to help scientists design and synthesize new molecules while working from home. How it works: The online lab platform allows scientists to log on through a web browser. On a blank canvas, they draw the skeletal structure of the molecular compounds they want to make, and the platform uses machine learning to predict the ingredients required and the order in which they should be mixed. It then sends the instructions to a robot in a remote lab to execute.

Popular media depictions of AI often involve apocalyptic visions of killer robots, humans mined for resources, or the elimination of the human race altogether. Even the rosier visions of an AI-driven world imagine most traditional human efforts and behaviors replaced with machines. Our collective imaginations of AI are often focused on this "singularity"--an irreversible point when technology overtakes humanity. However, the realization of this kind of artificial general intelligence (AGI), where a machine can perform any cognitive task a human can, remains a long way off. It is true that there have been impressive advances in machine learning (ML) and that algorithms can now best humans at various tasks.

Facebook recently showed off the progress its AI research team has made in the realm of household robotics. The dream is to take the virtual assistant out of the speaker and put it into an autonomous body capable of traversing your house. To accomplish a task like checking to see whether you locked the front door or retrieving a cell phone that's ringing in an upstairs bedroom, AI assistants of the future must learn to plan their route, navigate effectively, look around their physical environment, listen to what's happening around them, and build memories of the 3D space. Facebook's created a new system called SoundSpaces that gives robots the ability to interpret sounds. Current virtual assistants merely listen for wake words and then use natural language processing to interpret verbal commands as triggers. While the microphone array technology behind some of these assistants is impressive, they're merely designed to pick up voices in noisy environments.

A troop of a million walking robots could enable scientific exploration at a microscopic level. Researchers have developed microscopic robots before, but they weren't able to move by themselves, says Marc Miskin at the University of Pennsylvania. That is partly because of a lack of micrometre-scale actuators – components required for movement, such as the bending of a robot's legs. Miskin and his colleagues overcame this by developing a new type of actuator made of an extremely thin layer of platinum. Each robot uses four of these tiny actuators as legs, connected to solar cells on its back that enable the legs to bend in response to laser light and propel their square metallic bodies forwards.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to redefine how businesses work. Already it is unleashing the power of data across a range of crucial functions, such as customer service, marketing, training, pricing, security, and operations. To remain competitive, firms in nearly every industry will need to adopt AI and the agile development approaches that enable building it efficiently to keep pace with existing peers and digitally native market entrants. But they must do so while managing the new and varied risks posed by AI and its rapid development. The reports of AI models gone awry due to the COVID-19 crisis have only served as a reminder that using AI can create significant risks.

Enterprises around the world are rapidly incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into existing and new products and processes. This effort is not just to improve such offerings and services, but to achieve a qualitatively higher level of capability not possible before. It is clear that AI carries the potential for many new opportunities, across all industries, but it is also already recognized that it brings numerous risks as well. As with any technology, senior management and board directors need to be aware of both the opportunity and the risk in order to successfully and responsibly manage the enterprise. The opportunities are great--AI can assist in robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning, natural language processing, finding new drugs and therapies, and will be essential for driverless transportation--but if the risks are downplayed or overlooked, there can be serious reputational and/or legal consequences.

In 1959, Nobel laureate and nanotechnology visionary Richard Feynman suggested that it would be interesting to "swallow the surgeon" -- that is, to make a tiny robot that could travel through blood vessels to carry out surgery where needed. This iconic imagining of the future underscored modern hopes for the field of micrometre-scale robotics: to deploy autonomous devices in environments that their macroscopic counterparts cannot reach. However, the construction of such robots presents several challenges, including the obvious difficulty of how to assemble a microscopic locomotive device. In a paper in Nature, Miskin et al.1 report electrochemically driven devices that propel laser-controlled microrobots through a liquid, and which could be easily integrated with microelectronics components to construct fully autonomous microrobots. Designing propulsion strategies for microrobots that move through liquid environments is challenging because strong drag forces prevent microscale objects from maintaining momentum2.